Loserdom

At the end of October, I was caught in storm. Thick flakes sped diagonally towards the concrete. It was the first snow of the winter and the first time I'd experienced temperatures this low in two years.

I had spent those two years in the tropical climates of Hong Kong and so I had lost all the good habits of a New York City dweller: I hadn't taken an umbrella with me, I hadn't dressed in layers and so I was completely caught off-guard by this very simple phenomenon -- the change of seasons. 

It was a visceral reminder of the fact that I had changed habitats. I was somewhere else now. That was very clear. When you move 8000 miles you lose so much more than just a physical home. You lose a social circle, a professional network and routines. You have to figure out where to buy your groceries, find a new job. You walk at a different pace. You find a new gym with new regulars -- or you don't. 

But during this short interim, you also become frighteningly aware of things. Of your priorities. Of your position in that lifelong, seemingly futile struggle to build a career. Of the extraordinary cost of cheese (Friggin' hell, smoked gouda used to make me happy at a much lower price).

I took a big leap coming back to New York to be with someone I love. I gave up a job, I gave up a place, as he did for me once before. Now I am anxious about the future. Sometimes, on sunny days, I can find excitement. But mostly, I feel restless. I work on projects, I volunteer, I read, write, edit, photograph, film; I find myself walking at a faster pace than those around me. I feel like a loser trying to be less of a loser by walking really, really fast.

That is how I found myself in that storm. I was dreading an empty apartment, wanted to feel productive, nay, cultured, and ran from my apartment to the subway, from the subway to another subway, and from that subway to a bookstore to sit down and listen to Junot Diaz talk.

This man had received a Pulitzer for a novel about a pudgy Dominican nerd. He is a professor in Creative Writing. He writes for the New Yorker. What's more is that he inspired countless people, among them myself, to embrace their ethnic identity in a literary world that largely centers around the lives of Caucasians.

He also spent 11 years writing the novel, he said. He almost gave up on it a couple of times. He felt like a loser for a solid decade because of it. But during this time of disorientation, of utter terror about the future, of -- dare I say it -- artistic struggle (!), he became the person he needed to be to finish the novel, he said.

We become that someone who is capable of doing things our former self wasn't able to do. Until then, he said, we need to be compassionate with ourselves.

You see, we read about heros who take years to get to an epiphany. We watch films depicting a man's or a woman's decades-long journey to become the best he or she can be. But then we forget that it takes practice to be the person you want to be, that it takes muscle memory to perfect the tasks we need to perform for our art, and that it takes mistakes for us to get to amazingness. We youngens like to scurry away and try and rush and make money and hand out business cards. We walk at a faster pace than some around us, thinking that it gets us there faster. But it's ok to be young and fledging.

Filmic storytelling and journalism

A colleague of mine recommended a book to me about editing, Walter Murch's "In the Blink of an Eye" (Walter Murch edited Apocalypse Now, The Godfather II & III and The Unbearable Lightness of Being among other movies). My colleague raved about the book because the author looks at editing in a more philosophical/conceptual way, rather than as a mechanical process that is needed to bring 3 hours of footage down to 2 minutes.

I'm about half way through the book, which is pathetic considering the large print and the lofty language in which it is written. But what I've read so far really spells out some of the most valuable advice I've been getting in shorter conversations from my colleagues. Visual storytelling is so much more akin to film than I thought.

I always saw fictional storytelling as somewhat divorced from journalism because of the infinite freedoms that the fantastic realms of film offer. But a few things still ring true when cutting a journalistic piece that seem to work so well in film. Kind of a d'oh moment, but heck...as a purist who likes to think that style should only be employed in both non-fiction and fiction, when it serves a story-driving purpose, I had a natural aversion to applying filmic theories/methods to journalistic pieces.

Which brings me to the heart of this post. How can we learn from film in journalistic endeavors and how much storytelling is and can be in the editing?

Choosing a shot

In some ways, Murch says, choosing what material you use is also choosing what not to use. Murch's theory is to use the following criteria, in order of importance and with weight in the decision making:

1.) Emotion (51%)
2.) Story (23%)
3.) Rhythm (10%)
4.) Eye-Trace (7%) --> what my eye wants to look at in large frame
5.) Two-dimensional plane on screen (5%) -- > so no funky angles
6.) Three-dimensional space of action (4%) --> where ppl are placed in relation to oe another

[Murch, Walter. In the Blink of an Eye. 2nd Edition. Los Angeles: Silman James Press, 2001. p. 18]

I particularly find the last four points rather interesting, small stylistic devices that I would otherwise not have thought of. The eye-trace, "the concern with the location and movement of the audience's focus of interest within the frame", for instance, gives me an idea of what I should shoot. If my interviewee is speaking of his job as an apple picker, I will continue to follow her/him while apple picking and start out from far away, get a medium shot, a shot of the person's face and then finally focus on the apple, the main subject of the interviewee's sound bite.

This hierarchy seems very reasonable and akin to some of our purposes. But to him the most import criterion seems to be emotion of a shot, which trumps over every other aspect combined. So he'd still go for the shot that encapsulates the right emotion, even if it might not further the story. And as useful as this guideline is, I'd think that this would be a classic case of "drowning your kittens," i.e. abandoning parts of your reporting that you fall in love with but have nothing to do with your story.

Since delivering information surrounding a main hypothesis (aka your nut graf) - and by that I mean not just facts but also aural, visual and emotional information - is imperative in journalism, I'd like to extend Murch's theory for my own purposes. Only if the emotions is imperative in enhancing the story, then I'd choose the shot accordingly. Because video is so powerful in highlighting the individual in a story, that, as contextualiazed in the nut graf, shows how the story applies to a large number of people and is the reason why we should care about the story, we can think of the material we choose as both a vehicle of factual information but also a constant reminder of the human and relatable side of a story. So in some ways, I'd like to think that if you go for emotion, it also has to have some relation to the story.

Yes, it is photography and video material that is a medium that is particularly good at delivering emotions. But I consider it one of various types of information (like a context, historical background, expert opinion, etc.) that make for a well-reported story. The photograph/moving image is like the anecdotal lede, the quote, or as some editors call it, the color of the piece.

Rhythm

Something else I've learned to appreciate is pacing and rhythm, Murch's #3 concern. An audio-visual story is bound to linearity, unlike an article or a graphic that allows for panning, scanning and skimming, and I firmly believe that rhythm is essential in delivering information in a digestable form but also enhance a piece's emotional value. There are natural rhythms that we set by choosing certain shots and - more importantly even - sounds for the introduction of a video. Above all, video is a medium that allows for emotional reflection within a verbal informational skeleton, built by the accounts of interviewees and narrators.

Pauses in narration and purely audio-visual periods in a video not only serve the purpose of punctuating a story; they separate ideas as mentioned above but also give the viewer time to take in the ideas that s/he has just been presented with and add another layer of information, mostly an emotional impression, that enhances, contradicts or extends the verbal information they follow. All that means for an editor is: don't cut so tightly to the script. Let the broll run by itself for a few seconds, let the visual be the punchline to the idea you're presenting.

Blinking - deciding where to make the cut

One of the most interesting things that I discovered in this book, is Murch's theory that:

"[...] the blink is either something that helps an internal separation of thought to take place, or it is an involuntary reflex accompanying the mental separation that is taking place anyway.

[...]
We must render visual reality discontinuous, otherwise perceived reality would resemble an almost incomprehensible stirng of letters without word separation or punctuation."

[Murch, Walter. In the Blink of an Eye. 2nd Edition. Los Angeles: Silman James Press, 2001. pp. 62-63]

He then moves on to say that often, imagining the blinking of a person can help the editor decide on how to cut a piece. Someone who is in a fight, he says, might blink more often and if we look at sports videos, say a boxing video, then you can see how quick cuts can mimick the blinking and the pace of the sport and add an additional layer of information to a journalistic piece. Same with employing blackness (shut eyes) in combination with sound.

This method is probably best employed when doing video profiles of people. It seems like the cutting then places the viewer into the shoes of the person portrayed. Mimicking her or his gaze, their blinking pattern, can be very effective.

Anyhow, I hope this was as helpful to some as Walter Murch is inspiring to me. It's a good and quick read (if you're not me, who has too short a commute to get more than 10 pages of reading done each day).