Reality TV: An Insider's Guide to TV's Hottest Market (11 page)
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Authors: Troy DeVolld
Me, hard at work on an episode of a reality program. (photo by Lacy Augerlavoie)
A full season’s worth of field notes. While time-consuming to write in the field, they save a lot of work in post. (photo by the author)
Production
A
s I’ve said earlier, Story Producers can be folded into the mix at any point along the timeline. If you’re starting during the production phase, it’s a lot like stepping out your front door and being whisked down the street by a parade. Production, the period during which your show is taped, is comprised of the complex dance in which Camera Operators, Sound Mixers, other Producers and curious network folks are all buzzing about thinking about everything but what you need in order to make the show happen.
In my first experience coming aboard at the production stage, I arrived on-set at 8 a.m., just two hours before the arrival of the cast for their first day of taping. I had no knowledge of the plan for the day (much less the season), no access to castmember bios beforehand to familiarize myself with their backstories and personalities, and barely enough time to settle in before the show and the action took off like a rocket. It was quite an experience!
When joining production in a well-controlled location, you’ll keep an eye and ear on the action from a remote area referred to as the “video village” or the more formal “control room,” where video and audio monitors can relay what each camera operator and audio mixer is getting on-set.
Why monitor the action remotely? Fewer bodies live on-set means less scurrying out of the way when a camera operator is trying to follow a subject. Keeping the set relatively clear also allows your cast to settle in and not have to perform to a gaggle of strangers running around with headsets and whispering to each other on the edge of earshot.
Field Notes
“Field notes,” which recount a shoot day’s activities in a format that includes time of day and content, are essential to postproduction later. Work at them slavishly, as I
promise
you that good field notes will save your sanity down the line.
If it’s up to you to take your own field notes on-set, don’t let more than two or three minutes go by without making an entry. These notes are your road map for reviewing story content later, and the denser your notes, the less time you’ll spend scanning through material in postproduction. Before you start, be sure your watch or whatever timepiece you’ll be referencing in your entries is in sync with the time being recorded by the cameras. Ballparking time can result in your notes being several minutes in either direction from the timecode actually recorded, making postproduction tape review a nightmare for you and your colleagues.
If you’re on location during production, bring a laptop, but also bring a legal pad and pens in case anything goes screwy.
1
I’ve learned that electrical power on location can be spotty and that even a solid charge on the best of batteries won’t see you through a full day’s shoot in most cases. As laptops go, I’m a large fan of the smaller netbooks, perfect for on-location note-taking and far less cumbersome than a full-size model. Investing in additional batteries is a great idea and well worth the money.
When taking your notes, keep each entry brief, as you’ll be making them all day. Remember, too, to keep the language simple so that you can use your word processing program’s search function to find keywords later. If you’re really fond of something that you want to remember in postproduction, add the all-caps word GOOD to the end of the entry. If you know something happened, but aren’t sure whether it was well-covered, add the word REVIEW so you’ll know not to count on it until you review tape down the road. Other words I frequently employ are FUNNY, FIGHT, and CRY. Three or four weeks from now, when you’re sitting in your office a thousand miles from set and the source material isn’t yet ready to review in the system for some reason, you can at least be reviewing these notes and working toward guesstimating scenework.
A three-minute sampling of notes from the field:
10:57 Frank is first to arrive at the house.
10:59 Zoe arrives. Funny exchange with Frank about her pink luggage. FUNNY, GOOD.
11:00 Zoe trips on way to pick a bedroom, breaks lamp. FUNNY, REVIEW.
If you’re working a shoot with multiple cameras that are in different locations on-set, take note of which camera or crew is covering the action you’re seeing. While footage is often grouped for your Editors down the line (meaning they’ll be able to see all camera content at the same time in their system), the setup you’ll be working on for review and assembly of the material you’ll be passing along may not be set up the same way. So, if your “A” and “B” camera crews are shooting the arrivals, but the “C” crew is in another location (let’s say, in the car capturing reactions as people are being driven up to the house), you might want to make your entries like this:
10:57 Frank is first to arrive at the house. (A, B, C)
10:59 Zoe arrives. Funny exchange with Frank about her pink luggage. (A, B) FUNNY, GOOD.
11:00 Zoe trips on way to pick a bedroom, breaks lamp. (A, B) FUNNY, REVIEW.
You can’t be everywhere at once… but taking great notes from wherever you happen to be will free you up to hunt down the stuff you
didn’t
see for review later.
Hot Sheets
At the end of each day, a Story Producer or Field Producer is usually required to create a “hot sheet” detailing the highlights of the day in a oneor two-page summary that will be emailed to members of the production team and (sometimes) network execs after wrap or early the following day. These are used to track story and to keep others informed of major changes that may affect the action down the line.
The reason hot sheets must be executed and delivered so quickly is that if the field team gets even a day or two behind on them, the Producers away from set and back at the office are prevented from making any timely constructive input or helping to avoid chasing down content that they don’t want or need for creative or legal reasons.
Another word of advice on hot sheets: Be objective, and never ever EVER
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oversell action when summarizing the day’s events. Why? Because getting people who weren’t on-set too excited about specific actions means they’ll expect to see those moments in the show, even if the story takes different turns in postproduction.
Here’s the kind of hot sheet I like to see:
“BEACHES” HOT SHEET: DAY ONE (07/09)
SUMMARY:
Arrivals at the beach house went smoothly with a few characterdefining fun spots along the way: Zoe took a few tumbles throughout the day and there is much murmuring throughout the house about how she’ll manage to ride a surfboard if she can’t even walk. She and Frank became fast friends, becoming our only co-ed room share.
Tara and Dana are old rivals on the competitive circuit (established in interview and underscored by some great reaction shots) and did their best to avoid each other during the morning surf at Flagler Beach today.
To everyone’s surprise, uptight Penny won the surf-off, winning a new longboard from XYZ boards. Her gloating afterward caused some animosity.
Only one blowup today: Penny’s declaration about public beaches and “surf bums” didn’t sit well with the others during her post-challenge gloating. Frank called her on her poor attitude and disdain for the surfing lifestyle, and the rest of the gang piled on. As a result, Penny spent most of the day after lunch alone, and in mid-afternoon interviews stated that she is “already over these losers.”
Generally, the gang is excited about tomorrow.
There’s enough here to show that story is developing, but enough restraint in relaying the info that it reads in a straightforward and factual manner.
Here’s the kind of hot sheet you don’t want going around:
“BEACHES” HOT SHEET: DAY ONE (07/09)
SUMMARY:
Arrivals at the beach house went smoothly today except it’s totally obvious that Zoe is an uncoordinated fool who will probably drown herself if she ever gets near a surfboard.
Tara and Dana hate each other, and it shows. Expect big blowups there!
Bitchy Penny won the surf-off and a new longboard, and started a HUUUGE fight back at the house afterward when she went off about surf bums and Frank got mad at her about it. She is already an outcast — don’t be surprised if she doesn’t come out of her room again for the rest of the show.
Boy, do I hate hot sheets like this one. Everything is oversold, there’s tons of conjecture about what will happen in the days to come, and character types have become so crystallized that if Penny wakes up tomorrow and apologizes, Tara and Dana get their heads in the game or Zoe simply manages to not drown, it’ll be a disappointment to everyone who expected something else to happen. Hot sheets like this one can jam up the note process in postproduction when your execs and the network start seeing rough cuts that don’t deliver what the overly hyper, exclamationpointed hot sheet content implied.
Interviews
Let’s revisit the interview process for a moment now that we’ve moved on to production, as your characters are now in motion and your needs have changed.
The purpose of interview content gathered during production is twofold: to provide clarification of action or emotion in anticipation of or in reaction to an event, or to provide context in establishing locations or purposes for being at those locations.
Using interview in any other way is usually superfluous to story. Why would a character simply narrate an action we can
clearly
see is happening?
Interviews vs. OTFs
Once things that demand commentary start going down in the field, you and your Field Producers have a decision to make — pull your cast aside for a small amount of time during or just after important events to grab a few quick OTF (“On The Fly”) quotes and responses, or hold off to do formal sit-down interviews every few days to recap events.
I’m a big fan of the OTF interview because the reactions are so much more authentic. You’ll get tears, passion, laughter, rage… big, big energy. If you wait a few days to ask someone to recap an event in a more visually composed setting (I’ve worked on shows that rely only on formal interviews conducted several days, a week, even two weeks apart), you’ll likely lose that sense of emotional immediacy — a high price to pay for a pretty interview shot.
In fairness, formal interviews have their own advantages. If you’re crushed for time in the field, you can cover a lot more ground by getting many days worth of content in one sitting. You have time to mull content over, figure out how you think it’ll be used, and tailor your questions and desired responses more closely to what you’ll be needing them for.
Here’s another exercise for you that will illustrate the usefulness of formal interviews in comparison to OTFs:
Remember that analogy I made where I compared home improvement shows to lab frogs? Well, put on your lab jacket and goggles again, because I’m about to have you take that scalpel and t-pins to your favorite hour-long series.
Grab that same old pad and pen and cue-up three episodes of your favorite show, preferably one where participants don’t spend all their time in a uniform of some sort. Now watch the episodes, keeping track of what people are wearing in their formal interviews. It’s easier if you pick one or two people rather than trying to track a full cast.
Be sure to watch for:
• Characters wearing the same outfit in-interview over multiple episodes or seeming to change outfits during commentary on one scene. Indeed, almost any time a castmember is wearing an outfit in interview that does not match what they are wearing in-scene, you’re looking at a formal interview.
• Hairdos and haircuts that change over the course of interview clips within the same episode. Why? Because an interview done in April may contain content that can be used to make a point in June, if you get my drift.
• Content that addresses specific actions versus content that more generally addresses character relationships.
