What does it say?
When Gutenberg first laid paper to inked typeface, there were almost no rules of grammar.
For more than 1,000 years, literacy, where there was any at all, had rested in the far off monastaries. Punctuaction, paragraphs, standardized spelling – none of that existed.
The technology of printing may have suddenly become universally accessible, but there were two problems:
-99% of the population was functionaly illiterate
-The only concepts for communicating ideas in writing were the product of a thousand years of disparate hand-written texts.
Today, as the tools of video are suddenly thrust into the hands of everyone, we find ourselves in very much the same situation as Europe in 1452.
The vast majority of people in the world are video illiterate. Oh, they are certainly capable of picking up a camera, pointing it at a few Mentos crammed into a coke bottle and recording the resulting fizz bath. But the notion of communication complex ideas or concepts or even emotions in video is not the same thing.
We will soon grow weary of people falling off skateboards and hopefully begin to use these powerful new technologies to communicate far deeper and more important things – but this takes new tools of construct.
The grammar of video has, until now, been residual with a handful of people – those who worked in TV stations of production houses. And even that grammar was very much the product of a process that was both complex and expensive – and to a large extent secretive. A kind of medieval guild – passed by long years of apprenticeship.
The medium is capable of much more; of a kind of flowering – the sort that text enjoyed in the 100 years after Gutenberg. A period of learning, expansion and experimentation.
But all this begins with grappling wth the idea of video literacy.
That telling stories in the medium is more complicated than just hitting the record button and hoping for the best.
Let’s take video story telling.
To a large extent, news and story telling in video are today driven by text. That is, material is shot, logged, transcribed so that the video content is transmuted into text, robbing it of much of its power.
The text (log notes, timecode notes and transcripts) are then processed into a written text script which is then transmuted back into video in the editing process.
This makes no sense.
It’s very much the product of a text-based world grappling with video which it tries to treat as text as best is can.
This is a process of script writing that is inherently destructive to the power of video. It dessacates video. And today, with cheap non-linear edit systems that allow you to manipulate video directly, there is absolutely no reason to do this.
To add insult to injury, in this video to text to video system, we write the narrative (the story telling part), remove it from the realm of video, take a narrator and put him or her into a closed record booth with a scrap of paper that often contains only the lines to be read – completely removed from the video experience, and record the narration that drives the final product.
Crazy.
Really crazy.
These are remants of another era – remnants that must be expunged from our production process for the future.
4 Comments
marc kusnetz March 31, 2009
This is a response to Michael Rosenblum’s response to me. (His follow-up did not provide a “leave a comment” box.)
At the risk of sounding like a cracked record, I must take issue again. I submit that the comparison Mr. Rosenblum draws between story-telling and script-writing is a red herring. Given what he means by “script-writing” in this example, who in his right mind would want to preserve it? So in this particular calculus, I guess I’m in total agreement!
But enough with the false distinctions; here is the real one: good story-telling versus bad story-telling. This is all that matters, and all that could ever matter. One can, of course, cite an example of bad story-telling, label it script-writing, drive it from the sacred temple of new media, and bask forever more in the warm glow of the digital universe. Alternatively, one can dispense with semantics.
All visual story-telling, whether it’s online, on television, or on some medium now unimaginable to our early 21st century minds, should — as Mr. Rosenblum points out — simulate a listener and a recounter, schmoozing in a comfy living room. But come now, let’s also get real. Let’s acknowledge the ways in which the metaphor breaks down. Let’s point out that the listener doesn’t ACTUALLY talk back to his computer screen or his t-v screen while watching someone else’s story. Let’s point out that it’s the story-teller’s job to anticipate what the listener would ask if the two parties were really sitting side by side, and then adjust the story-telling accordingly.
A story-telling scenario that casts the listener as truly a participant is an unfair scenario. Following that scenario with a lame script-writing scenario compounds the unfairness. It is, I submit, an exercise in sophistry.
martin fletcher March 31, 2009
Mr Rosenblum left me hanging. He built up his whole thesis towards saying there is another, better way, and then doesn’t say what is it. It’s easy to say that the existing process sucks. But what is better? Martin Bell of the BBC never wrote a script. He told the editor he wanted so many seconds of this shot and so many seconds of that shot and then just spoke into the microphone, as the editor worked, building his reports as he went along. Is that one way. Mr Rosenblum also says that most people are video illiterate. Who’s the judge? And what to do about it? And anyway, so what?
marc kusnetz March 30, 2009
There are two possible interpretations of Michael Rosenblum’s comments about text and video. One is merely procedural: Rosenblum is suggesting that students of video would be well-advised to try alternative techniques in story-telling. Fair enough. However…….
The other interpretation is that Rosenblum is making a STATEMENT about the intrinsic nature of digital, video story-telling. This, I think, is the accurate inference because Rosenblum’s own words point us in that direction, i.e.: “…material is shot, logged, transcribed so that the video content is transmuted into text, robbing it of much of its power.”
There is a presumption here that I believe to be ill-advised. Simply put, video can’t be robbed of its power just because someone takes notes. That sounds glib, so I’ll say it another way: the power of video is inherent in the images. The content can’t be transmuted into text — it’s a physical impossibility. The power of video is either unleashed or squandered because of other considerations entirely: juxtaposition, pacing, sequence, and so on. Whether logging and transcription precede the editing process is of no consequence; many successful pieces, I’m sure, have employed them, while others have not. Similarly, many unsuccessful pieces have used logging and transcription, and many others have not.
The fault lies not in our techniques but in ourselves. That too sounds glib, so I’ll say it another way: video does have power, but it is useless without the accompaniment of a much greater power — namely, an organizing principle. An idea. A process that can yield coherence, without which all is lost. A story whose composition is based solely on the ‘power’ of individual pictures is essentially a form of sensationalism. In recent years, that catechism has yielded up any number of ‘rules’, each of them specious: always start with your best picture; never let a shot last more than four (or five, or six) seconds; treat talking heads as you would treat carpet stains — by covering them as soon as possible; the list goes on and on.
There is, I maintain, no process that is “inherently destructive to the power of video.” No procedure is certain to desiccate video, although any procedure might. (And why is it assumed that any given approach will lead inexorably to a script — a narration? I take notes and I don’t use narration.) I concede that my point can be seen as splitting hairs. But I don’t think so. The larger point is that, although every new technology (moveable type, printing presses, radio, television, the digital explosion) is, at first, revolutionary, requiring new approaches and techniques, each of them also requires a set of common questions and responses: What story am I trying to tell? What elements do I need to tell the story? How can I maximize my chances of bringing clarity to a complicated undertaking?
The answer lies in quoting that great 20th century philosopher, John Lennon: whatever gets you through the night…it’s all right, all right.
Cliff Etzel March 27, 2009
Agreed