The Power of the Typewriter… for Video

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Several years ago, Lisa bought me an old manual typewriter.

It turned out to be a very powerful tool for making video.

It’s an Underwood, built in 1912, the same year as the Titanic, but unlike the Titanic, my typewriter is still afloat and still working.

Whenever I have to write something important, particularly a letter to the CEO of a major company, and I want to make sure it is actually read, I write it on the typewriter. I have found, over the years that typewritten letters, sent in typewritten envelopes, generally get read. This is because getting a typewritten letter today is so unusual – or because when the envelope arrives, the CEO thinks that someone has kidnapped their kids. In either case, it has proven to get results.

It’s easy to delete an email, or just ignore it. But a typewritten letter commands your attention in the digital age. Also, unlike emails, which soon vanish into the ether, a physical letter will remain on your desk, a reminder to look at it once more.

In a world in which all we do, increasingly, is move around electrons, there is a certain satisfaction just in the physical act of typing. The Underwood is a massive steel machine, built in the Victorian Age and designed to last, which it has. Unlike touching a key on your phone, the very act of typing on a typewriter involves something real happening. You push down on the key, which you must do with some degree of effort, and a mechanical mechanism translates that downward thrust to a steel key with a letter typeface affixed, flying up and striking a ribbon held in place, that then actually prints a letter onto a piece of paper. In many ways, it is not all that different from what Gutenberg first did in 1450.

The typeface strikes the paper with a resounding ‘thwack’ and makes a small impression into the paper and deposits its ink there, leaving behind a single letter. The process is repeated over and over and there is a kind of rhythm; a kind of music to the whole thing. Thwack, thwack, thwack over and over. As you write, you hear it; you feel it. It is a very physical event and, in a way, you become part of the machine.

I love the smell of the typewriter, for it has a distinctive smell of ink and steel and lubricating oil, which you must do from time to time. There is a deep satisfaction in striking the keys over and over to create your document or letter.  The carriage moves as you write, and when you reach the end of a line, a bell sounds to tell you to throw the carriage which engages a gear that turns the paper up another line as you bang the carriage across.

But what does this have to do with shooting video? That’s the interesting part.

When you write on a word processor or a phone, you can write whatever comes into your head, and if you don’t like it, you can just delete it and try something else. It is inherently a messy and unorganized process. But with a typewriter, when you strike that key, you are committed to what you are writing. There is no ‘delete’ function. Therefore, the act of writing on a typewriter requires that you think before you strike the key. It’s the thinking part that is different. You have to know what you are going to write before you write it.

This is plainly not the case in video. In video we shoot lots and lots of stuff and we more or less figure it out later. You can’t do that when you are working on a typewriter.

A few years ago, I decided to try and apply the discipline that a typewriter requires to shooting video. That is, to think before I shot.

Many years ago, Lisa and I bought her father a computer, so that, as we lived in New York, he could send us emails. For a man in his 80’s, he proved to be pretty computer literate and soon we started getting email bringing us up to date on activities at home.

Once, when we were in England, I wandered into his small office and saw him sitting before his computer. The screen was open to an email, but he wasn’t typing out the email. Instead, he was writing out the email he wanted to send on a yellow legal pad, with a pen!

At first, I thought this was pretty funny. “Is this how you always send emails?” I asked him.

He said it was. He liked to write them out longhand before he typed them into the computer.

“Ken,” I said, “you don’t seem to get how this works,” and proceeded to show him that he could just type the letters directly on the screen, no writing necessary.

As it turned out, it was I who did not get it. Writing out his emails longhand, correcting and reviewing them gave him a chance to think about, and craft, exactly what he wanted to say. This is something we rarely do in the digital age because delete is so easy; because video is free, it degrades, in a way, the value of the written word or what we shoot.

In shooting videos, the NPPA standard is a ration of 20:1. That is, you shoot 20 minutes of raw material for every minute that appears on the screen. In Hollywood movies, the ratio can go as high as 600:1, but let’s stick with NPPA.

At a 20:1 ratio, you are, in effect, throwing out 19 out of every 20 minutes that you shoot to make a story – or throwing out 95% of your work. 95% of what you do will never be seen by anyone. This is a waste; a waste of time, but more importantly, it encourages messy thinking, or more often than not, no thinking at all.

But what if we shot video the way I write on my typewriter – that is, 1:1. On the typewriter, I never strike a key unless I am sure about exactly what I want to say. What would happen if I approached shooting video in the same way, that is, 1:1. I would not hit the record button unless I was sure that this was what I wanted to ‘say’ in video.

As it turned out, this works incredibly well.

In our Bootcamps, we teach the MMJs to shoot 3:1, that is, 3 minutes of raw material for every minute that will appear on screen. For most people who have worked in news this is hard to adjust to. They are used to a world of ‘spray and pray’, that is, shoot everything and we will figure it out later. There is an inherent fear of missing things, so they shoot everything.

We tell them that we “want them to miss almost everything,” so that they can concentrate only on exactly what they will need to tell the story – just like writing it on a typewriter.

Here is an example of a product of the Bootcamp.

This was done by Bob Costner, then the News Director for Spectrum News 1 in Greensboro, North Carolina. Bob was, I believe, 70 years old when he took the bootcamp. The story below runs 1:20. To make it, he shot just under 6 minutes of raw. As you can imagine, the story just drops into the timeline.

It’s like typing, only with sound and pictures.