Reality TV: An Insider's Guide to TV's Hottest Market (15 page)

A  WORD  ON  STAKES

As you compose your show, whether on paper or with an editing system, be mindful of the stakes in each scene. A bunch of talking heads are meaningless if they’re not advancing the story. Every castmember wants or needs something, and every scene should drive the story forward by hitting home what’s at risk for each person.

Stakes don’t always shout themselves out. Sometimes they whisper. Some examples of stakes that shout:

• A castmember must complete a challenge in order to achieve immunity.

• A group prepares to vote on who should stay or go in a competition.

• A player must excel in order to defeat teammates who have aligned against her.

In all of these examples, it’s pretty easy to see what the consequences will be for anyone who fails to succeed. But what about less obvious stakes? The ones that whisper?

Here are a few of that variety:

• A castmember struggles to overcome self-doubt and generate some self-esteem.

• A character risks embarrassment by agreeing to attempt something awkward.

• A character must decide whether telling the truth is worth losing an ally.

None of the above “whispered” stakes have game-ending consequences. Well, at least not immediate ones. But they keep viewers engaged just as the more obvious examples do.

If your source material is looking a little weak, there are a few tricks in your magic story bag that can be called upon. Here are a few devices that sometimes work, though I’m not advocating that you use them indiscriminately:
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THE TICKING CLOCK

Oh, no! This couple only has three days to finish renovating their entire house in order to have it ready for a realtor to show!

Really? Would you ever put yourself under that kind of ludicrous stress, scheduling an open house three days after you decide to completely gut your house? More likely than not, this is a fabrication created by the show’s producers and story team to add urgency to otherwise mundane things like completing a checklist of the “repaint/refinish/hang drapes” variety.

Other more subtle examples might include getting a pickup interview with a castmember to grab a few fabricated lines like: “I really wanted to finish this before Ted got home,” or “If I don’t get this place cleaned up in a hurry, Sheila’s gonna kill me.”

Inserting a ticking clock into a show is dangerous business, as they’re one of the most easily identifiable cheats around.

THE BIG DEAL OUT OF NOTHING

Let’s say we’re doing a fitness show about a bunch of people who have to complete physical challenges to win points, and the current challenge is running up and down a massive flight of stairs in a building.

The castmember who’s currently leading the pack on the show accidentally sprains his ankle, effectively eliminating himself from the event, even though he’s in no danger of leaving the show. He’s taken off to one side to be examined by an emergency medical technician (most physical challenge shows have an EMT on-set). He then ices down his ankle while the rest of the team completes the task.

Disappointing, sure. But get creative with your interview bites with other castmembers afterward, show him with the EMT, throw in a shot of an ambulance, and suddenly you’ve got people worrying what went wrong and whether or not he’ll have to leave the show as a result of his unspecified injury.

Sure, you can’t sustain the illusion for long (you’ll have to reveal the “just a sprained ankle” sooner rather than later to avoid ticking your audience off), but this kind of manufactured suspense makes for a heck of an act break.

THE REPURPOSED SCENE

Here’s a tricky one in which you’ll need to take an entire scene and create a false subtext. Let’s say you have a scene that looks like this, transcribed in two-column AV format for illustration:

Pretty innocuous content, right? But let’s see what happens to it when you add some more biting interview content leftover from a confrontation Katherine and Jill had about Katherine leaving her toothbrush and toothpaste out a week prior:

What you’ve just done is taken an innocuous bit of spare content, added leftover bites from an incident about a messy bathroom and created a cut-from-whole-cloth scene about how these two women, beneath their cheery facades, can’t stand each other.

Like I said… I don’t advocate this kind of heavy-handed stuff, but if it passes your ethical gut check, it’ll give your sense of drama a shot in the arm. My own rule of thumb is that as long as no one is doing something out of character or saying something that’s not in keeping with their usual take on things, it’s worth considering.

Composing A Stringout

A “stringout” is a loose assembly of scenework, dialogue and sometimes B-roll that is used by Editors as the loose foundation and starting point for their work. These can be created in two different ways — by creating a written edit called a “paper cut” that Assistant Editors can assemble into a stringout for the Editor, or by bypassing the Assistant Editors and assembling it for them yourself using an editing system like Avid or Final Cut Pro.

OPTION ONE : THE PAPER CUT

While many companies have made the change to providing you, the Story Producer, with Final Cut Pro or Avid systems to string out material before turning it over to your Editor, a few holdouts still require Story Producers to execute “paper cuts,” script-like edits that are passed along to an Assistant Editor to assemble.

You may be asked to format these differently from job to job, but here’s a fragment of how I usually write mine in the good old two-column AV for-mat you saw earlier, complete with narrative voice over (or V.O.) in caps:
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You’ll notice a few things about this entry.

Each clip begins with the source tape number (like 103010A03, which would indicate October 30, 2010), the camera (Camera A), that camera’s tape number (03, the third tape for that camera that day) and is followed by time code (11:25:30 in the morning). This is what your Assistant Editor is primarily concerned with when assembling the stringout.

If there’s one thing an Editor hates, it’s receiving a stringout for an eight-minute act that’s 30 or 40 minutes long. With the two-column paper cut, it’s easy to guesstimate the length of your stringouts to within a minute or two.

I don’t usually include end times on interview or OTF content entries (as in, “12:15:09 – 12:15:20”) because when you’ve got a literal transcription of something stated, it will be pretty obvious to the Assistant Editor when it ends, which is not the case with in-scene action. I might include an “out time” on interview/OTF content if the person made a weird or interesting expression at the end of their statement that I’d like to see make the cut, but otherwise, just an “in time” will do.

Check out the bit of OTF dialogue from Ricky in the last frame of the sample. If you have a single sentence or two of interview/OTF that you’d like to see omitted in the final stringout, just set it apart with forward slashes and strike through it. It’s much less stressful for you and your assistant Editor to strike through content than dice it into multiple single entries. In other words, there’s no reason to go this crazy:

It’s only a couple of seconds… don’t go nuts!

If you’re using the mostly outdated paper cut technique as part of your workflow, be sure to provide a copy of the document to your Editor even though he or she will be working primarily from a stringout. It’s useful to your Editor if your intentions are ever in question or if your stringouts aren’t executed exactly as you’d asked of your Assistant Editor, which can happen.

Now about that voice over content in paper edits: Keep it simple. Too florid, too clever, too precious? Dump it. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that your voice over copy is there to shout through the Reality clutter to tell the world you’re a literate writer, even if the mouthfuls of alliterative and cutesy turns of phrase might kill the person who eventually has to read them. Remember, too, that V.O. should be used for setting things up, filling in blanks, or guiding your viewers to react as you desire… not to merely reiterate what you’re already seeing on screen.

OPTION TWO : THE AVID / FINAL CUT PRO STRINGOUT

The game has changed in Reality Television. Where story skills were once enough for Story Producers, the tools and workflow have changed to a point where if you are not fluent in Final Cut Pro or Avid, your opportunities are seriously diminished. If you don’t have any film school friends who can teach you the basics, many community colleges and universities offer basic editing courses at nominal fees.

The chief benefits of creating your own stringouts in Avid or Final Cut Pro are:

• You can work at an accelerated pace and see how your story is (or isn’t) coming together in a way that you can’t with old-school paper cuts.

• If your source materials are grouped (meaning all available camera angles are available to view in a split-screen grid), you’ll save a lot of time knowing what will and won’t work by seeing the complete picture.

• You can more clearly articulate how you’d like the final product to look.

Remember when executing your stringout that you are
not
the Editor. The stringout should not contain dissolves or complicated cuts. The stringout exists only to efficiently represent the mechanics of your story to the Editor, whose job is, in turn, to take your coarse assembly and turn it into a visually pleasing end result.

Now what about the V.O. content you’d have normally written into a paper cut? Or the interview content and pickup scenes that you have asked for but not yet received from the field?
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Well, you’ve got a couple of choices. You can use the editing system’s title tool to create “cards” that you can drop into the spots where the anticipated content should go, or simply use locators or note features (unique to each editing system) to indicate materials expected for later.