Protagonist and antagonist

Extract 3 from Chapter 3 (Once upon a time .../ , page 63)

It is relatively easy to identify the protagonist as there is always somebody who catches our attention. The difficulty lies in deciding who the antagonist is; obviously this is only possible if we have correctly identified the underlying latent conflict.

Let us take the case of somebody who wants to stop smoking. Who is the protagonist? Why, he himself. And who is the antagonist? Some of us will say, “Tobacco”, while others will say, “the tobacco companies”. If his objective is to stop smoking the protagonist and antagonist are the same person, he and his guilt-desire cycle. A cigarette can’t be the opponent for the simple reason that it doesn’t speak or do anything, it is an inanimate object. It is the object onto which the protagonist projects his desire. The packet of tobacco could be the thread running through a story called “The Last Pack” because, as it gets emptier it gives us a very graphic picture of the process.

Imagine the dilemma of the woman who wants to get pregnant but has serious problems giving up smoking even though she knows that tobacco is bad for the future child. If she wants to accuse the tobacco companies of her addiction then we must find an antagonist in the tobacco company. The opponent is not the brand (like the cigarette the brand can’t talk except through advertisements). We have to find somebody who represents it. We need the antagonist to speak and take human form. If we can’t get access to a representative of the company we have to take an indirect route; advertisements, documents, letters or interviews in the media – in fact anything, but we will lose vividness.

But obviously, we can present two conflicts at once, internal and external. The previously mentioned future mother suffers an internal and personal anxiety and presents a social conflict. Our job is to adequately identify the contradictions and find a way that lets us combine both conflicts or highlight one of them. A conflict needs two sides, but one of them has to be a person

If we do a report on abuse of animals, the dog must be the co-protagonist given the need for somebody to speak for him and interpret how he feels. His owner can rationalize, the dog can’t. If we decided to give the dog a voice and speak for him we would be entering into fiction, a resource that helps us to imagine how the animal feels. But “imagine” is not a function of a journalist, who, anyway always has the door of “creative documentary” open to him.

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.)

Scales of Interest of the TV message

(from Chapter 6)  (page 103)

TV’s strong points

Catching the attention of the audience is the fundamental principle behind all acts of communication; it is the start of the process. We have to do everything possible for those watching us to maintain the audience’s interest so that they end up satisfied because they have understood it all. To do this it is vital to have the following principle very clear:

The domain of television is the definite and that which can be shown in images; its weak point is abstract concepts and intangible phenomena.

Television can’t transmit the smell of things, a person can say, “That smells nice,” or “That smells nasty”, or “What a smell!”, but if a person says “It smells,” we are dependent on their body language. If their expression is good the smell will be good, if they look disgusted it will be unpleasant. Smell is intangible for TV. There are many other concepts impossible to portray. The more abstract an idea, the more we need people and the subjectivity of their impressions. You have to bear this in mind, not only when choosing the topic, but also in the way you ask questions or appear in front of the camera in a report in the first person.

(See graph below)

Action and Emotion, Screen Magnets

On the following scale the capacity for attraction of the TV message is shown graphically, leaving aside any reinforcement we can add to each shot to make it more attractive such as music.

	Content of sequence	Talking about ...	Type of image
Spontaneous interest	Conflict in action	Definite things	Movement shots	
	The emotional situation		Close up of face	
 	The subjective declaration	 	Closeness	 
  	The announced and the explanation	  	Handheld camera	  
Paying attention required	Lists	Abstract or intangible things	Static and general shots	

Scale of interest of TV messages

There is no need to say that moving shots (where things happen) attract the attention of the viewer more easily than still shots, so any content will be more communicative if something is happening on the screen. When people are doing the actions the interest increases. The dullest of lists can be a bit more palatable if the person listing has expressive body language.

When it comes to animals, the more humanized they are, the more likeable they appear in our imagination: a dolphin, or a monkey awaken more interest than a praying mantis. The capacity of television to attract reaches its peak thanks to movement. You only have to watch a football match; most of the moves are similar and with a bit of luck there is a goal every 45 minutes but they attract more audiences than the radio. No fan that has a TV at hand will stop watching it, even if he is listening on the radio. The action is captivating.

Here we accept that abstract concepts are impossible to portray mentally with an image (the cryptic language of law or science, the names of people we don’t know etc.). The other scale on the graph is subjectivity. The more interpretive or personal a declaration is, the more value it adds. Subjectivity provokes the viewer to agree or disagree and this heightens his attention.

Lists

Of all the possible declarations, the least televisual is the listing of abstract concepts; for example “As first stated by Rodriguez and Smith in ‘The Month of May’ and corroborated in ‘Summer in the Monegros’” is deathly dull.

Objective listing is that relating to objects or things you can represent mentally. This factory produces 45,989 three-inch screws and 4,689 two-inch screws every day. This is unbearable but perhaps a little less so because we can imagine the shape of a screw and we understand that they make more large screws than small ones (all the same its thrilling, isn’t it?). Subjective listing is not very common because to introduce an evaluation the speaker tends to justify it with an explanation.

The Fundamental Questions

Chapter 7  ("El espíritu del reportaje", page 111 ) ISBN: 978-84-475-3119-6.

Introductory note on the flow diagram

The questions I always ask myself before giving the green light to a topic are those in the flow diagram below. As language is consecutive we are obliged to put them in order but any one of them could be the first question.

The first thing we have to think about as journalists is creating news, because if a report creates news it is doubly interesting; it will have repercussions in other programmes and other areas of the media. Not all news can be converted into a report of reasonable length but news is the essential raw material for news services.

Afterwards we will see what comes out, if it is a short news item or a report or debate, but this is already of merit because it is not easy to detect new news items so we already have something of value. I agree that every news item should be new per se but all of us know that a good part of the news consists of variations of a few old and redundant bits of information. If, in the course of our research, we have sniffed out a news item the best advice is to reorient the report to give the news the visibility it deserves.

Often, although we haven’t created news we know that it will become news at some point. Daily news programmes look for excuses or hangers to justify showing a report (because there is a congress, a world day etc) but in spaces reserved for reports this has little importance; it is a topic because the programme says so.

So if we start with a known news item.../

Do we include a new point of view?

Can we amplify or enrich the information?

As a reporter gains a taste for audiovisual narrative he runs the risk of giving less importance to journalism because he believes that the main contribution lies in the treatment. Big mistake. For sure there is something new compared with what we thought we knew a few hours earlier. Nothing is changeless, new information or new witnesses can always appear. If he doesn’t look for them nobody in his team will do it for him. The answer to at least one of the two initial questions always has to be yes.

Things are not really important news until they are on the telly.

If you get the first film footage of something covered in other branches of the media – then go ahead. The contribution of images is an important element. A photo in the paper is not the same as a sequence. We must not forget that TV is the most important social reference known, in other words, please go on.

A clause that guarantees a safe bet for a report is a positive answer to this question:

Does it contain Conflict?

If the topic contains conflict then we are doing well, as we have seen, life revolves around continual resolution of conflicts which generate more contradictions. If we know how to detect them and isolate them then we will see beyond initial appearances.

The same way that Diogenes looked for the man with the lamp, you should look for conflict. It is the quickest way to build a story because once we have understood the conflict and identified the parties everything falls into place automatically. Things come out by themselves; you just have to follow the process. A conflict must have a protagonist with a particular desire or objective and to reach it he will come up against some definite circumstances, some difficulties; usually caused by other living beings - the antagonists. Sometimes the difficulties are the result of forces of nature and the protagonist experiences the conflict within himself but he finally triumphs or gives in to the unutterable.

All conflicts evolve in a usually long process and resolve one way or another, or at least they leave the situation open. A changing situation is a sure source of sequences. If the chosen topic generates images and actions, then so much the better; we will have a machine that runs itself. Another advantage of conflict is that if you know how to put salt in the wound then people will speak up clearly; they will want to be heard and they will want us to understand their reasons. Even the most obtuse of us speak clearly when something hurts. Debate arises between the two parts, if we do our job well the viewer also gets involved in the debate.

If we are not generating news and neither do we see conflict we have to ask ourselves:

Are we doing something new?

Sometimes routine clouds our view and we don’t have our contribution clear. You don’t have to look far, it is sufficient to structure and properly document some information that is being badly explained. If the value is fundamentally educational or it is spreading the word, we are closer to a documentary than a report. My experience makes me distrust anyone who says they don’t need to bring anything new to a topic because the impact will lie in the treatment they give it. I’ll only accept this from professionals with a solid track record . The writer’s kitchen is not possible without good raw materials and wide experience. When choosing topics don’t put the emphasis on the treatment; concentrate on getting the prime fillets and you can worry later about the condiments. If is obvious that if the topic is not news, doesn’t have conflict or an original aesthetic or publicity value something is missing. It is well worth reconsidering everything and, if you can’t find convincing answers, don’t hesitate to discard the topic. Don’t take a single step without a clear topic there is no type of urgency that can justify it.

Now comes a question that might seem blindingly obvious but nevertheless is very important.

Is the Topic Associated with Living People?

We said at the beginning of this book that the report shows in images the essence of a story lived by people and relates them to their context from a current perspective. The two following questions will explain why these points are in italics.

Without people it is very difficult to explain stories (we have seen this when we discussed abstract concepts). Even some animal documentaries humanize the beasts and ascribe them certain reasoning skills or cultural awareness that are more typical of humans. This has nothing to do with journalistic method.

A reporter is interested in the relation between people, their community and the environment, of which the flora and fauna also form a part. For this reason the protagonists have to be people or living beings with a relation to humans. In the programmes I have directed I have never considered the possibility of a project about reproduction of herbivores. On the other hand, the expedition of scientists who went to Vietnam to certify the discovery of a new species of ruminant mammal, similar to a goat, seemed an excellent topic. The focus of the report was the scientists and the peasants. Even if they didn’t find a single specimen, there would be a report, and if they did there would be news as well, especially if it was the first time we had seen it on TV. In contrast a documentary account would centre on the goat and the camera would definitely actively avoid the humans. A report would find out about the socio-environmental conditions that had allowed the species to survive, it would identify the risk if a black market started offering money for the horns or trophies of the animal. As it is almost impossible to fix clear boundaries to decide what fits and what does not in the space of a report, my criteria has always been to see if the topic provokes people to take sides, as we will see. The central idea here is that we are interested in the human landscape.

Kosovo, The Human Landscape

(Inset)

We were doing a report on the process of the disintegration of Yugoslavia when at four o’clock in the afternoon we received the news we were to be expelled from the conflict area of Kosovo. We had to leave first thing in the morning. We had about three hours of light and we were about half an hour from Pristina the capital. The report was half done. Things had got a bit complicated two afternoons before when we went to a meeting in a Serbian neighbourhood in Pristina. We had filmed for a bit but suddenly everyone got very edgy. We did not know why but they refused to continue with us there and insisted that we leave the meeting. We left but we had no idea what was wrong. Once at the hotel our interpreter listened attentively to what we had recorded.

“I’m the problem, because I’m Albanian,” he explained. In the meeting they said something very compromising for the Serbians and they were scared that an Albanian accompanied by TV crew was witness to it. This also explained the translators own particular interest in the proceedings. Going through the tape we found out that we hadn’t recorded the critical moments, possibly because we did not understand Serbo-croat or perhaps because by the time we had set up the camera the most crucial part was already over, but obviously the Serbians didn’t know this. The translator was Veton Surroi, an Albanian journalist who had lived in Spain, where his father had been an ambassador for Tito. He spoke Spanish perfectly, English, Serbian and Albanian so for us he was ideal. But he was not just anybody and although we knew that, we could not have imagined that he could have caused such a reaction from the Serbians. We must not forget that this was at the time that there was neither a war on, nor had one drop of blood been spilt, although there was considerable tension. Shortly afterwards Veton Surroi founded Koha Ditore, an Albanian language paper and in the midst of the Balkan war he would form part of the Kosovo-Albanian delegation who negotiated the Rambouillet peace agreement. In conclusion, working with him was a provocation for the Serbians, who thought we were spies.

Although the next day we hired a naive tourist guide as a translator, things had already started to get more difficult when we went to film at a mine, which was one of the hard-core centres for the Serbian nationalists. We couldn’t understand what they were saying there, but it certainly was not entirely innocent as we were given a very hostile reception. The same day the Serbian press proclaimed that the TV3 crew were personae non grata and would be expelled immediately but we did not know this at the time.

So, to round off, “What can you do when you only have a few hours to finish a report?” This caused some friction between the members of the team. As I mentioned, we were some way from Pristina when we knew we were to be expelled. On the way to the city the producer and my other colleague, who was also an ENG* like me, wanted to film some shots of the Kosovo countryside before it got dark. I flatly refused. I said we were more interested in the human landscape, which was what was cracking up, not the countryside. They insisted that we could use this type of shots to say what we wanted and in any case it was not necessary, because we almost had enough and it was getting dark. There was no time to argue and tempers flared. I took all responsibility for answering to the director and said that if we needed countryside footage we would buy it from archives. Bringing the hierarchy into it is not always the best way and if I offended my colleagues I repeat my apologies from here, but I still believe that my reasoning was basically correct. At the end of the day you can understand the Balkan problem without seeing a single shot of Kosovo but by concentrating just on the people; the place where they live is merely an accident of circumstances.

Finally we went to a farm where two orthodox Serbian families lived and where some of their relatives were gathering. In what remained of the afternoon we were able to find out about the Serbian point of view; they were scared of being oppressed or even exterminated, if the Kosovo Muslims gained independence. The sequences we filmed were powerful and restored the working atmosphere amongst us. We learnt that the human landscape is definitely more important than the geography.

And an additional word of advice: even though you don’t understand a word of what they are saying, record it.

*ENG: (electronic news gathering) in this case a professional figure who unifies the functions of journalist, operator and editor of news items and reports, a video-journalist.

Classifying reports in function of the intermediary

Extract 9 from page 133, ISBN: 978-84-475-3119-6.

Who is the narrator?

We now have a clear topic for a report and an idea of how to focus it. “Now what do we do?”

We have to choose the most appropriate type of narration to explain this particular story. Now we will take a look at the four great reporting styles that I think can be established according to the relative position of the journalist as an intermediary between reality and the viewer.

Discreet Intermediary (The Spanish programmes: 30 Minuts, Línea 900, Informe Semanal (Weekly Report) etc)). Third person narration and the journalist does not appear on the screen. As this is the classic reporting style, much of this book refers to this type.

Declared Intermediary:First person narration, open to subjectivity and modification. The reporter does not hide his participation; he becomes a co-star of the news. (The programmes Beyond 2000, España Directo, 48 Hours, Caiga quien Caiga ... -despite big differences- ). The journalist looks directly at the camera.

Neutral Intermediary: Makes it seem as though there is no intervention from the journalist or that it has been reduced to the minimum. There are two sub-groups:

• “The Watching Eye”. The camera is a curious watcher that doesn’t try to interpret reality, only show it. What is known as the fly-on-the-wall. There have been a few experiments in Spain but the only lasting example was 24HOURS from the French agency CAPA.

• “Shoulder to Shoulder”. This is a story told as much as possible by the protagonist who is selected previously by the journalist who supervises the whole project (for this reason it is not possible to say that there is no intermediary). There are also two versions of this, which we will deal with later.

Discreet Intermediary

A narrator, who tries to be noticed as little as possible, explains the story of a subject in the third person. Here attention is focused on the protagonist, that is to say the subject of the information, and not on the journalist, who never looks into the viewers’ eyes or appears on the screen, not even to ask the questions (there are a few exceptions but then the journalist only speaks to the interviewee).

Within this school there are two tendencies:

Some believe that it is more honest if the interviewee never looks into the camera but at someone who we know is there but who we never see; the journalist who in the end is responsible for making the report. It is a way of suggesting that the message is being manipulated.

Others believe it is better if the interviewee looks at the camera as directly as possible as this is the way to establish the best communication between the sender and the receiver of the message. If the journalist is only a communicative catalyst “Why do we need to know he is there?” Can’t we leave the viewers alone with the subjects?

In some countries like Spain the only people who speak into the camera are the king, the president of the country and other authorities, obviously apart from the TV presenters and actors in ads. It is assumed that looking directly into the viewers’ eyes will exercise a hypnotic quality and so it is only reserved for people established in power.

To appearances, the discreet intermediary in either of these two forms, is the most objective formula for making a report because the journalist does not gain protagonism. But notice one detail, the voice of the interviewer is nearly always cut during editing. We have to admit that in not including the questions we leave a large possibility for manipulation as the answers are out of context and nobody knows the tone or sense in which the question was asked. So, you have to be extremely respectful of the interviewee if the questions are not shown.

The declared Intermediary

The reporter is seen from the beginning. He appears on screen speaking to the protagonists or directly into the camera. He speaks in first person singular, which is very direct, or plural, which is less direct. He should not worry about subjectivity or expressing his opinion or his feelings about a situation or a person.

The storyline can follow the same lines as the investigation process. This way the viewer directly lives the experience of the journalist and shares his doubts and difficulties.

Personally, I think of the three types of report described here, this is the most powerful because it allows you to transmit a lot of information not visible to the camera: heat, odours, humidity, underlying tensions and so on. Above all, it allows you to be sincere with the viewers.

People relate to each other primarily in words so this type of report is “normal”, in that the interviews maintain the dialogue between the guide and the protagonists. There are programmes that abuse the interview method to a point of using the images simply to fill in between dialogues. We have all seen situations in which the relation between the participants seems forced, “Sir, come here please!” so they also appear false.

The key is knowing how to keep a balance. There is nothing wrong with the journalist being the protagonist if it is justified. In this case there is no need to be shy. It is not as if the journalist can take the viewer by the hand and take him round the museum, for example.

The Heart of a TV Report, Contents (El espíritu del reportaje)

ISBN: 978-84-475-3119-6.
Prologue

Introduction

Part One: The Journalistic Approach to Reality

1. What is a Television Report?
2. The News, the Polestar of Journalism

Part Two: Telling Stories

3. Once Upon a Time ...
4. Types of Stories

Part Three: The Topic is Everything

5. Criteria for Selecting Topics
6. The Scale of Interest of TV Messages
7. The Fundamental Questions

Part Four: The Topic will Tell You How it Wants to be Treated

8. The Genres of Television Reporting
9. Classifying Reports in Function of Types of Intermediary

Part Five: Take Aim

10. Focus
11. Research
12. The Intermediaries Between Journalists and Reality

Part Six: The Art of Asking

13. The Questionnaire
14. What to ask?
15. The Interview and the Character Portrait
16. A Handy Working Tool

CV Jaume Vilalta

Periodista. Director de Quèquicom.