Stewart Pittman, defender of the TV faith, has a nice post that features two of his recent pieces as examples of the type of solo TV storytelling he’s doing, without falling into the veejay pit (he prefers Cameramanthropologist, but says it won’t fit on a business card.)
In How I Roll, Stewart tells the story of two features he shot, scripted and edited. Neither, as he points out, break any ground or reinvent anything, but they are nice pieces, as near as I could tell. Any doubt is because of the way the Fox station that benefits from the Lenslinger’s presence serves its video: it’s Flash video but on my computer it stutters all the way through.
This is a nice, instructive bit of reporting from Stewart. It also reveals something that is increasingly bothering me about TV: the lack of credit that goes to those who gather the images. You read the descriptions of the work our single storyteller put in (shooting, script-writing, editing) and then go to the site and see that credit for the pieces is given to the reporters, whose only contribution in each case seems to have been to read the script. You’d think, at least on the website, they could give credit where credit it truly due.
(This fits with something I noticed when I started to become educated about visual storytelling: books on how to write and report for TV seem to vastly outnumber books about shooting images for TV, which seems odd for such a visual medium.)
TAGS: TELEVISION, STORYTELLING
Mark,
Thanks for the plug. Not sure why the video stuttered for you – as it works fien in the many computers I’ve watched them on. As for the lack of credit, it’s soemthing we TV news shooters learn to live with. There is a certain star-factory school of thought in broadcast newsrooms, that while hopelessly outdated, is still rather embraced. As a result, there is rarely any credit given off-cam, for fear the audience may glimpse the man behind the curtain. We’re still a long way from transparency. Perhaps that will change one day, but in the meantime I’ll take solace in the facts that the paychecks don’t bounce. Thanks again.