I thought I’d mix things up a bit this week & share a slice of content I’ve been working on with one of the fastest European sprinters in the history of athletics.
Dwain Chambers.
Dwain has an incredible story to share about his time as an athlete for Great Britain, and the drugs ban which followed his illegal attempt to get to the top of the sport.
His story is one of remarkable highs & crushing lows. A truly Herculean effort to drag himself back from the depths of despair which I’ll share from the words of the man himself in the coming weeks.
His inpirational talk, & the courage he shows to bare his soul on stage, quite simply blew me away.
But before that, in order to get to know Dwain & provide him with some content for his social media channels, I was invited to film a coaching session he routinely runs at Lee Valley Athletics Center to help young footballers with their running techniques.
Very often as a Video Journalist, particulary in sport, you only get 15 minutes or so to film teams training, or sportsmen & women at work, so it was a joy to spend far longer with Dwain.
Of course, then I had over one hour & fifteen minutes worth of content to sift through & condense to a two minute social media reel…!
You can check that out above. But as I was working, the similarities between writing & videography/editing struck me & I thought I’d share some key points.
Both are a collection of disparate elements brought together into - you hope - a unified whole, requiring creativity, attention to detail, & an awareness of the expectations & emotions of potential viewers/readers.
Stephen King lists the three primary elements of stories & novels in his book On writing, which I think maps to visual art forms, as: “narration, which moves the story from point A to point B and finally to point Z; description, which creates a sensory reality for the reader; and dialogue, which brings characters to life through their speech.” For description as it pertains to filming, you would sub in visual language/style.
The cameraman, like the writer, has three shots at their disposal: the long shot, the medium shot & the close-up. In both domains, you must zoom in close to convey emotion, and far out for perspective. “Writers early on in their apprenticeship” says Nigel Watts in Writing A Novel “have a tendency to use mostly long, or mid-range lenses: we get the layout of rooms, and where people are positioned, but nothing on a more intimate scale.”
When video editing, the use of music, different speeds, still images, GFX & the like to build a narrative mirrors a writer’s use of pace, dialogue, setting, locale & texture.
‘Kill you darlings’ - as Steven King says later in On Writing, “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.” No matter how happy you are with a line you wrote or a shot that came out nicely, it does not not mean it belongs in the story you’re telling. “Mostly when I think of pacing” King goes on “I go back to Elmore Leonard, who explained it so perfectly by saying he just left out the boring parts. This suggests cutting to speed the pace.” There is no room for self-indulgence. No matter what is written on the page, or recorded on the memory card, the true work is to trim away everything that is not strictly necessary, to excavate the story as it were.
Character is King. Let your character & their experiences/personality determine the shape of things. Aristotle believed that plot was the most important element in the hierachy of dramatic effects, followed by character, dialogue, music & spectacle (music is style in a novel) while EM Forster held character to be more important than plot. Henry James then pointed out that plot & character are the same thing. ‘What is character but the determination of incident? what is incident but the illustration of character?’ It’s easy to get bogged down with chronology & the like when video editing, but engagement is best served by accentuating the emotions of your subject & letting their natural charisma shine through. Luckily someone like Dwain has so much of it!
Raising questions. Unanswered questions are the primary delivery system for tension. I can think of no medium or narrative where unanswered questions do not drive engagement.
If anyone is looking for coaching sessions with Dwain you can reach his team at this address: info@chambersforsport.
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