jrn 572de - lecture three

JRN 572 - Researching & Writing the News DocumentaryRich Hanley, Associate ProfessorLecture Three

JRN 572 - News Documentary

Lecture Topics• Understanding Story


Understanding Story:• Bernard presents the most

powerful reason why structure exists in storytelling.

• “Simplicity of structure allows for complexity in the overall film,” she writes in the required course text. (47)


Understanding Story:• Bernard writes that structure is

embedded in the narrative spine of the story.

• That spine provides the supporting infrastructure around which to braid complexity yet have the story make sense to the audience.


Understanding Story:• The narrative spine is also

known as the train, or the motivational push that drives the work.

• The train can be condensed to a single sentence.

• That sentence can be repurposed as the film’s logline, or broad summary.


Understanding Story:• Bernard writes that a train has

to be both universal and specific.

• That brings to mind a statement made by 19th century philosopher Orestes Brownson.

• He wrote a sentence that every writer should download:


Understanding Story:• “People grasp the universal

through the particular.”

• In other words, a story must be universal in theme and specific in detail and it must be told that way through its structural organization in order to work.

JRN 572 - The News DocumentaryUnderstanding Story:

• The universal aspect attempts to ask a large question (will the team succeed?).

• The specific seeks to answer it within the structural train but maintains fidelity to the larger question to give the film a wider, more universal impact.


Understanding Story:• And it starts with knowing the

audience.

• The story must immediately capture the audience’s attention.

• The best way to do that is by asking or showing the universal question or statement.


Understanding Story:• Take one of my films.

• It was released in 2010 on Connecticut Public Television.

• Titled Last Days of the Coliseum, the story’s logline, or summary, suggests it’s about a building:


Understanding Story:• Last Days of the Coliseum reveals

the tangled history of the rise and fall of the New Haven Coliseum and the generation that called it home for 30 years.


Understanding Story:• The full train, though, isn’t revealed

until the opening sequence to hook the audience.

• It opens with a brief summary of its history and continues through to a passage on the fact that the city closed it and later blew it up.


Understanding Story:• Here it is the first segment with the

open.

• Please watch the open until the title card sequence. It is followed by slides with the script from the open.

• It is not necessary to watch the entire 30-minute segment, which is part of a two-hour film.


“It is all gone now, finished. The New Haven Veterans Memorial Coliseum, just a few blocks from the ancient Green in this Connecticut city …


“Incomplete, eaten by rust, corroded by salt, the Coliseum brooded for a generation over downtown New Haven’s southern gateway, as if retrieved against its will from antiquity …


“Many imagined its state of rough decay reflected their awesome gods of pop culture who performed there …


"Rock stars. Hockey Players.Pro wrestlers.LegendsDivas …


“In January two thousand seven, thousands blissfully gathered to witness the final spectacle, the building’s implosion.”


• That passage suggests people partied in the moments ahead of the implosion.

• Then, the full meaning of what’s to come is revealed in the following clause of the last sentence of the opening sequence:


• “… But the festive mood darkened when the cloud kindled by the collapse dispersed, revealing the end of something else altogether.”


• With that, I raised a universal question: what really was lost if not just the building?

• I raised the stakes beyond a nostalgia-infused list of things that happened there over 30 years.

• And structure can carry that story through multiple acts and multiple storylines, each presented consistently.


• Among the films posted this week is The Moment by Errol Morris.

• The film is about Bob Geldof, who many people in the audience may know as the musician who created Live Aid in 1985 to raise money to ease a famine in Africa.


• That fact is visually clear at the start of the film and it suggests that the film is going to be both universal (the event) and the particular (the person who create it) in the opening sequence.

• The audience is hooked.


• The same holds for Tom Rinaldi’s piece on JaMarcus Russell, a former NFL quarterback, also posted for this week.

• Russell suffered the universal experience of failure, established at the start. His response is the specific.


• Documentaries that open with a central question of a universal nature and then immediately reveal the specific through an interview or statement in the voiceover are setting the film in motion and carrying the audience along.


• In the simplest structure, a documentary will have a beginning, middle and end, the classic three-act arc.

• The opening sequence may not be considered to be an act. It’s called a cold open to present the story in summary form and to pose either directly or indirectly the larger issue in play.


• Its important to note that the acts open and close with difference visual devices.

• Rarely are acts labeled as such; the break is usually signaled by a fade to black dissolve, not a hard cut.

• Sometimes, it is an explicit change in content alone,


• Act One introduces characters and explores the conflict or problem that the documentary must resolve. (58)

• In short, it uses expository techniques (i.e., interviews or voiceovers) to set the stakes and raise the emotional temperature.


• Act Two is the most difficult act to write or produce, as this is where the story can get stuck in the mud with expository clutter or accelerate to the ending without heightening Act One’s drama.

• The clear and present danger is a reduction of storytelling to a list of things that happened.


• Act Three serves to intensify the story and move it a close, tying up loose ends.

• The end can wait until just that, the end.


• Please note that three-act structure is an organizing tool and not a rigidly constructed.

• Some documentaries can insert five acts and an epilogue but all must have a beginning, middle and an end.

• The Coliseum film has five acts, for example.


• Even though structure sets in place a form in which to pour content, it is not necessary for the content to flow in strict chronological order.

• It is also not necessary to have one storyline.

• Multiple storylines can be used as long as each resolves.


• A Bernard points out, it is possible to tell a chronological story but not in a chronological way. (68)

• Time is a flexible element in documentaries.

• The film can be linear or nonlinear.


• The most important piece to consider in the writing/producing of a documentary is coherence.

• As long as the story is coherent, has a larger universal theme connected to specific elements and is presented in a consistent structure, the documentary will work.


• And please remember that the most creative aspect of the documentary occurs when a subject that has been neglected is selected to serve at the core of a work.

• The presentation can also be creatively approached, as the animated documentary on Doc Ellis posted on Blackboard shows.


• But even the creative flair of the Ellis piece has structure, this one with two acts, not three.

• Be creative but be consistent in the approach in terms of the narrative spine and structure through which it moves.


• In summary, documentary filmmakers at the writing and research level (and at the producing and directing level, too) engage in a continuous ballet of problem-solving within a creative medium that requires fidelity to facts


• The capacity to paint abstract ideas to filmic reality must occur within extraordinary constraints, including:

- Firm sidewalls of the factual- Time to research it- Money to research it- Time to produce it- Money to produce it


• Now that we understand our goal – understanding the definition of a story - we will tackle the principles and practices that go into assembling the components and help us navigate through the constraints

• And it all boils down to solving the problems of story structure before the commitment of time and money on production

jrn 572de - lecture three

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