Reality TV: An Insider's Guide to TV's Hottest Market (14 page)

Story Producer Cary Krowne and Editor Mark Cegielski work together on a scene
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(photo by the author)

PilotWare, a commonly used digital asset management platform that, in addition to vault management, allows the story department to access, review and create stringouts. (photo by the author)

Notes:

1.  Reliance on written notes alone is a mistake… you’ll likely cramp up, or worse, be asked to type up your notes later.

2.  I can’t insert enough “evers” to make this point emphatically enough.

3.  Word of advice: Try your best to start and end scenes on in-scene actions and statements whenever possible.

4.  Most easily when words before or following end or begin, respectively, with sharp consonant sounds.

5.  Again, your camera operator should be paying attention, sometimes you’ll be the one who catches the goof.

6.  I’m not overselling you on the glamour, here, am I?

7.  If you can’t get castmembers to converse in a hot tub, hang up your Reality hat.

8.  Accompanying castmembers while ziplining, whitewater rafting, rock climbing, or anything else that scares the pants off of you, for example.

“How could they not have covered that?”

“Was the sound guy asleep?”

“Who wrote these hot sheets?”

Before you fly completely off the handle, remember — hindsight is 20/20, and things get missed in the field no matter how good you or your team are. You can’t fix
everything
in postproduction, but your job now is to tell the best possible story with the content you’ve been given.

Rethink Your Outline

Remember the episode outlines you (or your Producers/Field Producers) cooked up in preproduction? I’ll wager a hearty handshake that half of that grand design went out the window in the field once story began to unfold. There’s no way to completely predict the new story opportunities that will come up once the cameras start rolling, or which planned events will fall flat, so it should come as no surprise that I suggest you use the first few days of postproduction as a time for re-evaluation.

The Big Picture

If you’re working on a show whose main stories span a season rather than just separate individual episodes that are all self-contained, get the full run mapped out as far ahead as you can before you dive into the first episode. You’re less likely to work yourself into a corner that way, and I’ve watched many an otherwise talented and efficient Story Producer chase rabbits down the wrong holes for weeks at a time by skipping this step. A day or two of sweating over the full season can save you a mess of trouble.

Remember back in preproduction when we had two of our surf show characters set themselves up as the nice guy and the villain? Now it’s time to make sure that their journeys make sense.

First, consider each character’s arc from the point we met them to the moment we left. Penny, our snobby surfboarding heiress, developed an unlikely friendship with a handsome surf bum (the very embodiment of what she had always hated about public beaches), learning some things about herself in the process and becoming someone we could actually root for. Frank, that character who came on the show to inspire others facing adversity after his post-accident return to surfing, rode his great attitude all the way to the semifinals, serving as a source of strength to everyone involved. That handsome surf bum that Penny fell for gave away one of his own boards to keep another player in the game, one who ultimately threw a surf-off in order to repay him the favor.

With any luck, you’ll find after some analysis that you have a pretty jam-packed season of setups and payoffs, setups and payoffs. Sometimes they’re obvious, sometimes they may seem like you’re stretching a wad of chewing gum to the moon, but look back and really map them out. No participant in a Reality program is without a journey, even if that journey lands them right smack in the miserable place they started. Winning is a journey, just as trying and failing is… but how did your characters change and what did they learn?

Once you’ve beat out as many of these setups, payoffs and character milestones as you can on index cards, arrange them to form the key moments within each episode of the season. It’s that skeleton on which you can hang the rest of your show, episode by episode, avoiding the deadly trap of overloading early episodes with big action and not leaving anything dynamic for mid-to late-season episodes.

Keep It Meaningful, Keep it Moving

Now comes the tough part — fleshing out the episodes with scenes that embellish that basic structure you’ve created. Don’t be afraid to go out of sequence in your timeline. If there’s a great scene in which Frank and Penny argue over an omelet, it may not seem like much in its rough form. But insert it just before they have a major blowup on the beach and suddenly the omelet scene foreshadows the bigger event later. Throw in a bit of that evergreen interview content where other participants comment on Frank and Penny’s growing resentment of each other, and the second scene on the beach becomes more powerful because it’s contextualized.

It’s important to understand that any content without purpose is nothing more than visual noise and can really slow down the sense that your story is chugging along. Every scene in your program should propel the story forward in a compact and effective way. Momentum matters!

The Return of the Forecast Bite

Earlier, I wrote about the importance of the forecast bite. As the show fills out and you start to see where you can put in your act breaks, these are the statements that will help you support dynamic ends to your acts, hooking viewers to come back for more. As innocuous as Frank and Penny’s omelet scene at the end of an act may seem, underscoring it with a character stating “I’m pretty sure Frank and Penny both secretly want to drown each other,” punctuated by a loud “I hate you” in-scene as Penny storms off at the end of an act, is an explosion of action that will hook your audience into wanting to stick around.

So the Season’s Mapped Out, Now What?

So you’ve translated the whole mess into a beautiful stack of outlines. Now what?

Your Supervising Producer, Executive Producer, and even the network folks may be the kind that would rather wait for a rough cut (the first pass at editing that takes you and your Editor a couple of weeks to bang out) to start offering notes and asking why the story they’re watching in the edit bay doesn’t match the one they thought they’d be seeing.

That’s why it’s critical, especially under Reality’s usual time constraints, to pass those outlines you’ve just created along as soon as they’re ready.

My revised outlines are usually formatted like the following example. The parenthetical “A” and “B” markings here indicate content relating to my “A” story (the main story) and “B” story (a second supporting story), a practice I’ve adopted to ensure at a glance that my bases are covered. Sometimes I’ll go so far as to add a “C” story if there’s only a few beats to something funny or interesting.

As with all television, the “A” story is the main thrust of the episode, and the “B” or “C” stories are important to either maintain a storyline that’s taken a back seat for an episode or two or to just plain give us a break from the “A” story once in a while. “B” stories are also where I usually like to hide my humor in otherwise tense or dramatic programs, or conversely, hide my serious or touching content in an otherwise comedic program.

Pay attention to the length of each act (usually four minutes at the low end to fourteen minutes at the longest, dictated by the network but with a little wiggle room in most cases) and consider both how much information you’re getting across and how easy the story is to follow. Your audience will have to contend with everything from the kids crying in the next room to noisy commercial breaks.

As someone who loves story and hates repetition, that last bit of advice broke my heart when I started in Reality TV. It’s true, though. If a viewer can’t walk away to check on the soup pot in the kitchen and come back to the show fully understanding what’s happening even after they’ve missed a minute or two, you’ve failed.

Identify your strongest story each episode, augment it with strongly delineated “B” and “C” storylines, and you should be okay.