Types of stories, conflict or discovery

Extract from chapter 4 (page 71)

From my point of view there are two main types of stories in the field of reports and documentaries:

• The conflict
• The find or discovery

• Of which the portrait is a sub-type

The Conflict

Conflict, that is to say disagreement between two sides or the fight of a protagonist with himself creates the plot on which to base the narration. It responds to three basic questions; Who? Against whom? and “Why?”.But the other “W”s,or key questions of journalism: When? How? and Where? also have a part to play.

The Find or Discovery

The discovery starts from the premise that what we are showing is new for the spectator, either because it has never been seen or is rare, or because it is being seen from a new point of view. It answers two basic questions; “What has been discovered?” and “Who discovered it?”. Logically we also have to resolve the why, when and where. The find and the conflict are not mutually exclusive, far from it, they can occur simultaneously in many reports. The portrait has to uncover and show up the essential features of a subject or collective’s personality traits. It is particularly characterised by encouraging subjectivity, whether it is that of the subject or the narrator. The basic question is “What is the person being portrayed like?

Conflict, find and portrait can be combined in some special cases but it is most likely that if an idea doesn’t have a minimum of one of these elements “it is not a suitable topic”.

There are two types of conflict

Extract , Chapter 4 (Types of stories page 74)

Like a snooker player, the director of a documentary has to anticipate the consequences of the force he applies to his focus. The shot doesn’t only hit the ball he is aiming at but also others, in this way the reporter works with two types of conflict:

internal, between the protagonist and antagonist in the report or which is the result of intimate contradictions on the part of the protagonists,

or

external, which occur when there is a contrast between the content of the report and the opinions of the viewer because of religious, political, ethical, cultural or any other values important to him.

It is important to remember that any conflict between the values exposed in the report and those of the viewer are a resource that call attention and provoke a moral stand but they do not advance the storyline. In the section on “Selection Criteria for Topics” will look more closely at the relation between conflict and the report.

Vertical and Horizontal Topics

Extract from Chapter 4 Types of stories, page 77

My father, a fitter by trade, always said that to do a precision job well you had to work with both hands on the vertical of the matter. There are topics which automatically fit into the “vertical of the matter”. They are the topics that have the way in and the outcome of the process clearly defined.

A vertical topic is a unique event, not repeatable and generally a news item that takes place on a particular day or short period of time and which sweeps the protagonists towards a conclusion. As it means something special to them, the protagonists are always going to be more concerned with the events than with the camera. It is absolutely not an ordinary day but very much a special day. Vertical topics include: championships, events, most rituals, all types of catastrophes, elections, competitions, exams, and of course parties and such like, performances, strikes and demonstrations and so on.

Horizontal topics, if we define them by contrasting them with the vertical ones, have no leit-motiv or process that fixes them in time and shapes the action. They can be scattered across time or themes so the journalist has to be very clear about what he wants because one of the key phases (posing the question, crux of the problem and outcome) might be missing. Just because a topic is firmly stuck in a particular period of time doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t horizontal. The timing must drive the resolution one way or another or open up a sensation of suspense. If you take a normal, even if it is a representative, day in the life of a particular community, for example the deaf, the time element doesn’t add anything to the storyline, it is just a formality (why one day and not a weekend?). The following are horizontal topics: reports, tourist routes, most portraits of people and most topics of documentaries and so on. So to the x axis of conflict/no conflict we must add the y axis of vertical/horizontal topic.

(When we place a topic on the graph of a news story we need to consider the x axis of conflict/no conflict and the y axis of verticality/horizontality.)