One of the weaknesses that I saw in my own experience with video is the lack of preplanning I did. In “Writing the Package,” and “How to Focus, Interview, and Get the Story Told,” the importance of preplanning was driven home. Coming from a print background, it’s easy to preplan the interview questions that you need to ask. As I found out when going out to shoot video, I lacked the ability to think of the story visually and preplan the visual questions that I would need to answer for my audience. These two articles showed that knowing what your story needs visually at the outset allows your shoot to be more productive and successful.
But as I looked at the advice in “Writing the Package,” I was troubled. Is broadcast news just a sort of formula that you plug in new words and shots into? While it’s easy to create a successful package with this sort of ‘lead-in, visual lead, main points, close,’ is anything lost in the formulation of commercial news? Will this formula ever get reconfigured, and when - when the audience gets bored with these traditions?
I also found a similar type of formula while working in radio. Maybe I’m biased towards print, but I see print as having a less formulaic approach to storytelling, with a general structure to all stories, but not a tight blueprint.
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