How many times have you heard this advice? Make sure your story has a beginning, middle and end. Even the great Lewis Carroll shared a version of the standard counsel in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: “‘Begin at the beginning,’ the King said, very gravely, ‘and go on till you come to the end: then stop.’” Sounds simple, right? But CNN’s Candy Crowley has a variation: “Every story needs a beginning, middle and end,” she says, “not necessarily in that order.”
Can you really tell a story out of order? Absolutely, as long as you know what you’re doing. KING-TV’s John Sharify definitely does know what he’s doing and proves it with this story:
It’s a risk to tell a story backwards, but Sharify and photojournalist Doug Burgess (the 2013 NPPA TV Photographer of the Year) crafted a piece that pulls the viewer in. Close-ups introduce characters. The narration and three quick insert shots suggest there’s more to the life cycle of a PB&J than you think at first: “If Anthony only knew…the rest of the story.”
The story is packed with surprises, each one unveiled as it unfolds. But instead of revealing what happens next, Sharify and Burgess show what happened before each critical moment in the piece. It takes a lot of skill, planning and teamwork to make this structure work so well. It also takes courage and heart. Bravo, Burgess and Sharify.
2 Comments
In the 1960s French new wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard set about breaking many of the so called narrative rules that framed Hollywood cinema e.g., continuity eye match cutting, blocking, and that a film could have beginning, a middle and an end, but not in that order.
New wave would influence generations; in the 90s, noticeably, Tarantino and Pulp Fiction. Tarantino even named his production company after Godard’s film A Bande à part. CNN’s Candy Crowley re-iterates an important point which envelopes cinema and art, which itself is influenced by literature.
One of the earliest profound books was Finnegans Wake, by Joyce, which played with the linearity of a story.
Here’s the rub though, news making generally eschews cinema and the novel’s literary discursive properties. News is a genre of a media form that says this is reality as it happened, rather than a version of it rearranged.
Though it’s not news remember the fuss around Michael Moore’s docs about the sequence of events and editing. Thus news films playing with structure and ‘in media res’ have to be aware of when time and events are critical to the story.
That there is room to think this way in the noughties, albeit in a strict fashion in news, suggests how producers seek to play with the form’s structure at a time when news’ main narrative form is showing its age.
I talk more about the interstices of narrative within news, art. literature and journalism on my site viewmagazine.tv
Cheers
David DG
London, Uni of Westminster
Thanks for the reminder about the New Wave and its influence, David. You’re quite right about the hazards of playing with the sequence of events in a news story. It works in this case, I think, because the narrator makes it clear to the viewer that he’s taking things out of order. The use of the conditional (“If he only knew the whole story…”) and the time stamp (“right from the very beginning”) early on in the piece accomplish that. TV news doesn’t lend itself to this kind of structure often, in large part because you need time to let it play out and most stories–in the US at least–run a minute and a half or less. Thanks for sharing the link to your site.