The Wasted Potential

Don’t look at the camera…

We are spending this week with The BBC in Bristol, in the UK.

We’re running a bootcamp for 40 BBC producers, directors, associate producers, researchers and God only know what other positions they hold.

We don’t care what their former jobs were.  We are here to make them video literate.

The group we happen to be working with this week is the Natural History Group.

These are the same people who produced Blue Planet and Meerkat Manor.

In fact, the producer for Meerkat Manor is in the group.

You know the drill. Here is the camera. There is the door. Go out and bring back a story.

Four days of intensive, hands-on filmmaking, with our usual ‘public praise, public humiliation’ evening screening sessions.

So far, so good.

Places like The BBC (or ABC or NBC or NPR for that matter) are magnets for talent.

They naturally attract people who are both creative and who want to create content.

The tragedy of our industry is that, up until now, we have not allowed 99% of those people to touch the very equipment that creates that content.  We have not let them get their hands on a camera or an editing system. Instead, we fractionalized the creative process – one person came up with the ideas, another researched the story, another shot the piece, another wrote the script and yet another edited it together.  Insane. Really an insane way to work.

What is equally insane is to have a building filled with creative and highly motivated people and then consciously restrict them from creating content.

Well, this is understandable as it was once both expensive and complex to take out a film crew and shoot a film. Today, as any 12-year old can tell you, it is neither complex nor expensive to shoot and edit video.

12-year olds are great when it comes to technology, but when it comes to creativity, you want the kind of people who are walking the halls and going to meetings at The BBC.

What you don’t want them doing, however, is walking the halls and going to meetings. What you do want them doing is picking up a camera and a laptop and heading out the door and going out to create content.  Lots of content.

These people travel all over the world on their massive shoots, whether is for Blue Planet or Meerkat Manor or a dozen other major projects. They often spend months, if not year, creating their content.  A few hours. The vast majority of their experience, the vast majority of what they have seen and learned is never broadcast on TV.  There just isn’t the time and until now there hve not been the resources.

Now, they can do this on their own.

Empowering creative people and vastly expanding the reach of The BBC.

Not a bad way to spend a week.

Next week, we’re back to DC for The Travel Channel Academy.

Same concept, different people.