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Storyboxing: Visual outlining and structure

Idea Lab , ,

You have been reporting and reporting. Hours of interviews. Gigabytes of video. You’re ready to write. And then you face it, The Monolith of Your Own Making. You have so much that you don’t know where to go with it. The story is actually 13 potential stories, depending on what material you use. There’s a moment of panic, possibly accompanied by compulsive cookie eating. You have too much stuff and don’t know where to go.
I’d like you to meet a concept called “storyboxing,” which is a way to build structure for multimedia stories. It’s a visual concept and it feels a lot like outlining with one big exception: We group multimedia assets — photos, video, graphics — by themes. That allows us to move an entire theme within a story’s structure without wrecking the rest of the structure. This is predicated on a simple idea: Every asset within a theme directly supports the theme. The theme directly supports a statement about what the story is about. Therefore, every asset supports what the story is about.
Step 1: The Story Statement and the Motor
Ideally we want stories that are “narrow-deep,” tightly focused that don’t wander. So we need to start with a simple statement about the story. I’m a big believer that if you can’t summarize your story in a simple sentence, you don’t know what the story is yet. So I push our students to develop a single-sentence story statement. And because I’m not subtle, it starts with This story is about…
In our story here, the story is about the growing phenomenon of ticks biting people and making them allergic to animal proteins.  The story statement is the beginning of our contract with the audience —we want them to understand what’s going to be in the story. We want it to be narrow and focused. But we want it to reflect the depth we have in the story. The story statement is going to function like our nut graf. It’s going to provide a roadmap to us as we create the story; it’s also going to control what we do and don’t put into our story. Ideally, it will have the foundational fact of the story (essentially the story’s verb that acts on everything else) and the themes that we’re going to approach within the piece. Then we’ll right a motor, or a conflict statement. That’s what propels the story along — where our conflict statement comes from.

Story statement: A bite from a Lone Star tick can make a person allergic to meat — and Missouri’s Lone Star tick population is increasing.

Motor: This once-rare occurrence is happening a lot more than it used to and anyone who is exposed to ticks is at risk.

Step 2: Broad Thematic Areas
The end of the story statement above continues three topics or themes. That’s going to be our structure. They relate directly to and support the story’s overall idea.  I tend to use a three-theme structure, because it mimics the three-act structure that works so well in a 3-minute broadcast enterprise piece. But you can make it longer. Just remember that everything has to go directly back to the story statement.
Here, we’ve introduced three broad thematic areas:
1. A simple tick bite can have serious consequences
2. What happens after the tick bite
3.  The tick population in Missouri is getting bigger and there’s no cure. 
Step 3:  Building Waypoints into the Themes
We’ve spent a lot of time so far on developing the big pieces — what the story is about and how we’re going to get them. It’s time to get into the weeds. And that’s another advantage of storyboxing: I don’t have to think about anything except the theme I’m working on. Because if the details support the theme, everything will work out fit at the end. So let’s look at the theme “What happens after the tick bite.”  I want to hit more than just a simple idea in a theme, so I need to create a mini-outline. I call these waypoints, because they’re essentially navigational checkpoints in each theme that keep me from getting lost.  The first point I want to make in this theme is introducing my two characters, the Alpha-Gal protein and Mary Jones, my central character. Another point I want to make in this theme is the moment where everything changed in the central character’s life.
What’s the advantage of that? Why can’t we just start throwing assets into the box? Because the best stories have a macro-structure and a micro-structure. There’s a place for everything and everything has its place. The waypoints assure us that will happen.
Step 4: Attaching assets
This is the easy part. Assuming you know what your content is. Let’s say you’ve logged or transcribed your footage or whatever. All you have to do is find the right thing for the waypoint. You as yourself a simple question: “Does this directly support the waypoint?” Because if you’ve done the previous steps right, your waypoints support your themes and your themes support your story statement. This approach means you don’t have to worry about killing a darling that would take your story off wandering. Because it will never pass the “Does this directly support the waypoint?” test.
Step 5: The box
When all the assets are attached, we essentially have “themes in a box.” Everything that lines up under a theme is attached to that theme.  Each theme is complete as is. It can stand on its own. We can examine our structure from a 35,000-foot perspective. If something doesn’t fit, we can shift it around. But we’re dealing with structure at a macro level here. So we’re shifting a theme, rather than the minutiae of a single fact; that heavy lifting has already been done in the above steps.
Let’s say that we designed the story with a soft-feature top. But a new case of the disease has been reported and the news director wants it for the top of the newscast, so it needs to have a hard top beyond whatever the anchor’s intro is going to say. We can easily swap out that first theme where we develop the character for the second theme. The character-development theme slides back into the second slot and we’ve saved a bunch of time and heartburn.
That’s pretty much it. Does it work? I’ve had students use storyboxes for six years and I can see a definite difference between stories that use it and don’t. My teaching partner and I have been requiring students in our junior-level multimedia reporting class to storybox every story for the last two years. Stories are coming in more focused and roam less than they used to. And we spend less time in structural revision than we used to.
But I’ll leave the last word to one of my students who still uses it in her work at a major network: “I still go back to this when I have trouble.”
And here’s an example  a team of students did for a story.

3 things to consider about shots

Story

Another semester passes and that means it’s escape from weird b-roll. Like the shot of a cat in a story about a chimney company. Or the inexplicable shot of a college-age woman vomiting in an alley in a story about the elderly.

Thus, today’s mild rant about the concept of intentionality: the idea that every shot that goes into an edit should have a point and propel the narrative forward.

You might want to think about what you’re shooting in these terms:
1) What is the purpose of this particular shot within the narrative? Video is just another kind of sentence and every shot should have a purpose that moves the sentence/story forward. We can’t just throw shots onto the floor and see what the cat licks up. 
2) What is my intention with this shot? Is it to show the location of a pizza place? Is it to show character? Then hew to that intention. 
3) Does this move/shot make the audience conscious that it’s being made? Viewing audiences don’t like to be reminded that they’re watching something that’s being made. They are also fickle and are looking for any reason to go on to something else. You want to avoid those movements that could knock them out of the narrative by reminding them that they’re watching something.

How Modern Baseball uses dolly-outs to create two senses of place

Idea Lab, Story , , ,

I’m deep, deep into the weeds of what each shot communicates. So deep, in fact, that I’m going to use the best video about being in a friend zone ever to demonstrate a concept.  That’s right, we’re going to use now-defunct Maryland pop punk band Modern Baseball’s “Your Graduation” video. It has it all: Shots with personality, a drummer screaming into a microphone while it precipitates around him, an opening shot of a pudgy guy laying in a bed.

Before we get into that — especially that last part — let’s talk about the role of a shot within a sequence. Or let’s start with the sequence. The sequence — a connection of linked shots, usually around an action — is a visual sentence.  In teaching video editing, we talk about five-shot sequences and we talk about three-shot sequences. I teach them as some combination of wides (which create context), tights (which drive the narrative and create character) and mediums (which combine context and character). But each shot serves its own purpose and I’ve been thinking more about that lately. For basic newscutting, we teach keeping motion in shots to a minimum: Only move when the shot needs to move. But as we get more advanced, it’s possible to use those shots to show character and setting — and to change both — with a little bit of movement.

Every time director Kyle Thrash introduces a new scene, it starts with a tight on our friend-zoned protagonist. He uses a simple enough shot, the dolly-out (a shot where the camera smoothly backs away), to create a sense of scene and character. It’s a combo shot. The tight at the beginning gives us character and the widening perspective of the dolly-out to a medium provides context.

If we divide the video into two stylistic choices — narrative and band shots — the narrative sections look like this:

  1. Tight on guy in bed. Camera dolly-out to show girl talking to him, though not sitting there.
  2. Tight on guy in car. Dolly-out to show girl talking to him in a car.
  3. Tight on guy at party on couch. Dolly-out to show girl talking to him on couch as couple makes out next to him.
  4. Tight on guy sitting on a swing. Dolly-out to show girl talking to him on adjoining swing.
  5. Tight on guy sitting on stairs at a Halloween party, dolly-out to girl talking to him.
  6. Tight on guy laying on snow. Dolly-out to girl laying next to him, then getting up.
  7. Tight on girl sitting on bench in graduation gown. Dolly-out to guy getting up and leaving.

The visual sentencing is so distinct and so structured in the video that you can’t avoid the symbolism of the switch at the end. But from a storytelling perspective, that dolly-out gives us the clues in every scene to understand the narrative.

Somewhere, somewhen and audience service

Idea Lab

I remember reading Steve Stockman’s How to shoot video that doesn’t suck and coming across the line “Every story needs a somewhere and a somewhen” and being thunderstruck. It gave a sense of purpose to wide shots. But the more I thought about it, “somewhere” and “somewhen” aren’t about visual grammar. They’re about audience service: How do we place our audience in the story and where do we place them? Is it October on the Great Plains in a drought? Night near the Brooklyn Bridge? Are we in a dramatic, wide open space or an intimate, cramped one?

But then I realized that we can use shots to place the audience within a story so they understand things better. Look at this clip from Tombstone and see how the camera’s wide shots aren’t just in there to break up the litany of tights and extreme tights of Val Kilmer’s lips Michael Biehl’s crazy eyes. They’re used to create a sense of where the gunfight is happening and the characters’ relative locations within the context of the grove where the gunfight is happening. It’s a small thing — but if you were to cut the scene without it, the audience would never get a sense of place within the moment.

 

Apps and gadgets, fall 2017

Uncategorized

Land you rent vs. land you own

Idea Lab , ,

Flickr is changing its user terms to sell a specific type of user-generated images without compensating the user. Not surprisingly, people are mad about this.  This old post about Facebook changing its terms of service to use uploaded photos in ad continues making its way around the Internet (ironically, posted mostly through Facebook). And just yesterday a business owner was complaining to me about how Facebook’s monetization policies are keeping her from reaching her audience’s newsfeed (her rant was inspired by this WSJ.com article).

My question to her: Why are you surprised?

The relationship of user:Facebook is the same as that of tenant:landlord, except that no money really changes hands (insert “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product” line in the argument).  What it means is that you have no control over what happens to your creative goods.

There’s an equation at work here: It’s less of an investment to go with what’s out there than to custom-develop something, even if it’s as simple as a website. When I worked for a large state agency with thousands of photos to manage, we lacked the funds and the organizational oomph to invest in a photo archive system that was open to the public but still serve the agency. So we put 4,000 photos on Flickr.  It seemed like a good idea in 2010. It could still be a good idea, assuming that Flickr doesn’t continue to lose its mind and try and profit from there (the secondary lesson: frequently check the permission settings on any “free” social platform).

This equation is at the the center of the argument that you shouldn’t build on land you rent, only on land you own. It makes sense when you want to do improve a house and it makes sense when you want to base an online presence somewhere. The problem with free services it that you’re entirely at the whim of the service provider (Facebook limiting brand Page appearances in users’ newsfeeds is a good example, as is Twitter’s decision to insert favorited tweets into a person’s followers’ feeds).  These places aren’t in business to lose money, so why wouldn’t they manipulate the business model to their advantage?

The underlying problem is that we’ve become accustomed to being given something for nothing. It’s Facebook’s and Twitter’s and Flickr’s and everyone else’s business model. You can only do so much monetizing the basic service model. The big money is in licensing, in advertising and in making brands pay for reach.

How do you counteract it?

— Buy a piece of land. You don’t need to go as far as building your own server stack, but you need to be in control of your platform.

— Build a website and concentrate on the engagement functions: quality content, newsletters. Bring people into your home, not an apartment that you rent.

— Don’t ignore the freeish social platforms like Facebook, but don’t make them the centerpiece of your engagement. If you want people to visit those locations of their free will, make it worth their while to check it by having frequent deals and incentives.

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