Video Production Putting Theory into Practice Steve Dawkins (Coventry University) Ian Wynd (North Warwickshire and Hinckley College) Contents Introduction Section One: Theory and Practice 1. Knowing: The Theory of Video Production 2. Doing: Preparing for Video Production 3. The Practice of Video Production: Pre-Production 4. The Practice of Video Production: Production 5. The Practice of Video Production: Post-Production Section Two: The Briefs 6. The Television Title Sequence 7. The Magazine Programme 8. The Documentary 9. The Drama Short Introduction People working within the creative media industries often mystify the process of video production. There is a well-known saying that video production isn’t as easy as it looks but isn’t as difficult as it is made out to be. While it is true that professional working practices are the result of much training, our starting point is that we believe that anyone has the potential to produce excellent videos. However, what marks out good or exceptional video production, whether professional or non-professional, is two things: the ability of the video- maker to understand and effectively work through the different stages of production systematically and their ability to think about what they’re actually doing at each of those stages and act upon those thoughts. Video Production: Putting Theory into Practice is a book for students who are new to video production in further and higher education. It is a book that links the types of theory that are applicable to video production that you will encounter on a range of different communications, cultural or media courses with the practical skills of video making. Our contention is that you need to combine the two - theory and practice – in all of your own video productions. This book, then, seeks to do three main things: 1. to build upon the knowledge of video and moving image production that you may already have, either from studying video on other courses or from the knowledge that comes from your experience of watching different types of video production at the cinema, on television and on the internet. 2. to provide you with the knowledge, both practical and theoretical, that will allow you to succeed on the course that you’re studying at the moment and develop as a video- maker 3. to begin to provide you with the skills and knowledge to allow you to proceed on to higher level courses or to think about getting a job in one of the media industries Why Link Theory and Practice? It is often said, especially by professionals who have been working in the media industries for many years, that theory is irrelevant to film and video production as, in the real world, people don’t use the concepts and issues discussed in this book. This often means that video production students concentrate on acquiring practical skills but marginalise, or neglect altogether, theoretical skills. For Tony Schirato and Jen Webb, this is the distinction between those with ‘tacit’ ways of seeing and those who practice ‘visual literacy’: the former is able to describe everything that they see but really move no further while the latter is able to glean information about meaning from the smallest of clues within a text (2004:2). It is this second kind of reader that you should strive to become as it is only by being visually literate, or knowing about how and why existing films and videos are constructed as they are, that you will become better at doing. While it may be true that media professionals may not consciously talk about the type of concepts that you will be introduced to in the book (although we know many who do!), they will definitely have, and use in their work on a daily basis, an unconscious awareness of all of them through their long experience of working in these industries. As lecturers and video-makers, we understand that it is tempting for new video-makers to gloss over theory, dismissing it as unrelated to their practice but there are immediate rewards to be had from applying theory to practice. You will find that an understanding of theory gives you the confidence to make decisions at each stage of the production process and reflect upon your actions both during and after the process. We all make decisions based on hunches or gut-feelings but often these hunches turn out to be superficial or, at worst, wrong. If you can back up your hunches with theoretical reflection, then it is much more likely that the decisions you make will be both creative and right. The difference between learning the theory and relating it to your own practice and working on hunches and gut-feelings could well be what makes the difference between being a Director and Runner, especially on educational projects. That isn’t to say that artistic flair isn’t desirable or important since it what can make a good production exceptional. It cannot, and should not, though replace a solid understanding of the process of video production, the ability to use theory to help explain that process and the ability to reflect both during and after production. It is this layered understanding and approach to video production that we hope to encourage in this book. This is where the activities that we suggest, in conjunction with those provided by your own tutors, will prove useful since it is only through systematic analysis and reflection that a true in-depth understanding of how and why media products are made, are made as they are and what possibilities there are for making them in different ways. Organisation of the book This is a book that can be read from cover to cover but is also a book that you dip into whenever you need information about a specific brief. With this in mind, we have split the book into two distinct sections: 1. Section One is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 outlines the key theoretical concepts that you need to use as a starting point when analysing existing video work and when producing your own video: these will need to be supplemented by further, higher-level theory depending upon the level that you are actually working at. Chapters 2 to 5 introduce the key practical techniques and skills that you need to be aware of when actually producing them. It is vital that you read and understand these chapters. For those whose interest has been awakened by them, there is a bonus chapter on the accompanying website that pulls all the information together from these chapters and applies them to an example of an existing media product: namely the American sitcom, Friends. 2. Once the types of theory and practical skills that you need have been introduced in the initial chapters, Section Two provides you with four typical student projects that will allow you to experience all the different types of video production that you may be exposed to as a student - location and studio shooting, documentary and drama production, narrative and non-narrative video – while using the key theoretical concepts to explore the projects in more detail. If reading the book and working through the briefs has made you consider a career in the media industries more seriously, the book’s companion website contains a section that provides you with useful information as to how you can make this more possible. Although not exhaustive, it gives you useful strategies for improving your chances of working in one of the most competitive and rewarding industries. It seems odd to say but you might want to read this first so that you can begin to acquaint yourself with the contents of it and then, when you have worked through the different briefs, revisit it with more experienced eyes. This book is designed specifically for, and relevant to, video students in education: there are key differences in the practice of professionals within the media industries that are either not relevant to students at the beginning of their video production careers or that we cannot cover in a book of this size and scope. We are aware, too, that each person reading this book will be working within the limitations imposed by their own teaching institution. What this means is that there will be certain ways of teaching and, more importantly, certain limitations around resources. We are not saying that our approach in this book is the only way to learn about the process of video production. What we know, though, from over twenty years experience of teaching video at all levels, is that the information we have included in this book, and the way we have written it, is useful for students. In each chapter and at each stage of production, we have attempted to provide you with ways of working in a manner that suits the ways in which students frequently learn. Although there is a huge amount of information in this book for you to learn (some of it very difficult), the reason for the subtitle of the book is that we feel that learning comes not just from academic learning but from ‘doing’. You must do one to do the other. The good news is that video making is very hard but also lots of fun so there is an underlying assumption in this book that video making is one of the most satisfying things that you can do, especially when the finished result is one that you can be proud of. We hope that you will be proud of your own productions and feel you will be if you do link theory and practice.