Do it with style

… hook the listeners and take them to places... (part 6 of the e-book)

One of the key ideas for everything that I’ve written about has been a union of content and style. If you have a piece that lacks substance or any kind of meaning – or just doesn’t reach a good enough standard – it won’t reach the listener. It automatically lacks the authority. I am not qualified to give analysis on basic human psychology, but I suspect that if your listener doubts the authority of anything in your piece, she may as well doubt the legitimacy of everything. It’s harsh. People like to know better and that’s why you must check what you’re doing.

But even that’s not enough. So, you don’t make any mistakes and you even double checked how to pronounce the French name you had to include, and no one can catch you for not knowing what you talk about. You can even bring out some rather outstanding new data on board and potentially improve the public discourse, but if your work is unlistenable or incoherent, you won’t reach many people either. And radio is still a mass medium. The people who decide what to put on radio have to think about that.

You’ve worked hard, with all the foot work of finding interviewees and angles, this is the time when you put it all together – so shine.

How can you start off strong? Try to hook the listener from the very beginning. Start with a provocative short comment from an interviewee or any audio that you feel would make the listener feel “I want to hear more”. Sometimes there are songs that start off bland and only in the chorus become very catchy. The reason we know this is probably because we hear songs over and over again, at least if we are music radio listeners, but when it comes to other content, we don’t have the luxury to think that maybe on the fifth listen, they will get it. There will probably only ever be one listen per listener. So regardless of how artistic you want your expression to be, if your message is more important, then you must think of the best way to communicate it.

I personally never like to start or finish with my own voice over. I just feel that surely there must be better audio to describe what I am covering. Surely I can’t be the most interesting person recorded. Surely, out of all the people, I can’t be the factor that makes my work stand out. If I was, I’d have to rethink really hard if my story and angle are good enough.

The beginning of your piece hooks your listeners and makes them want more, and then in the end, the final thoughts, hopefully, leave them thinking about your point. Or at the very least something. Whatever you end up including in the middle of these two things, think of them as factors that can boost your chances to be heard and remembered.

I was talking about the style and flair that the script gives to your audio, and while I am not taking that back, I must add that editing and compiling your work obviously deals with the same matter. I was also saying that when recording, do record a lot of audio that isn’t an interview, but just something happening. At this point, you start drawing from that audio archive you’ve created on locations. Which atmospheric sounds are clear signals of the space, and which ones signal the mood? Some other sounds are great for transitions between places and moods; from interview to another when they are in different places. I personally think cars work very well for that, but you’ll find that many of these things don’t have to be made too obvious. They are small signs maybe on the background communicating almost subconsciously  the message. Transition can be made, for instance, by cross-fading the relevant background noises with long enough mix, so the change has just happened. Use other audio over the fades and think carefully if you want to use your audio in a way that it’s bang! here, and now the next thing. Your mix of atmospheric tracks shouldn’t look like a queue of audio items but rather a number of tracks fading in and out and layered on top of each other. Well, at least possibly so. I can’t tell you exactly how your work should look like on the screen or sound like from the speakers, and of course we all like different things, but still, I’d recommend you to try and make  sound rich features and documentaries. Most people don’t seem to do so, so this can be your advantage and unique selling point.

Often we feel tempted to undermine our listener. In general radio practitioners seem to every time either under or overestimate the audiences’ attention span, brain capacity and dedication to listening. We can’t take anything for granted, but patronising won’t win you any sympathy either. Be clear, but don’t make your point like the listener is stupid. Contents like the ones we’ve been dealing with here, are probably listened to in a different way and in all probability with more attention. If not, they probably aren’t listened to at all, or at least not in a way that the message demands in order to be communicated in any meaningful way. So if we assume that people either give you their attention to an extent which is enough or then they don’t matter much (as far as your documentary goes), you don’t have to assume that they can’t comprehend anything. They can.

Actually, even if we assume almost anything, or you could prove my thinking faulty, I still think that people aren’t stupid and therefore shouldn’t be treated as such.

You don’t have to use a formula where you talk, place an interview clip, then talk more, another interview and so forth. Make the clips from different interviews talk amongst and to each other. Make them support each other, fill in gaps or even argue. You don’t have to always introduce them. Be creative and try it out. It may not immediately click, but with few trials and errors you might just get somewhere.

Sometimes this type of juxtaposing can tell so much more about the situation than you ever could verbally. How people approach things from different angles and have different priorities.

If you want to use the different interviews to support and compliment each other, try to find a seamless way to tell the story through a few different characters instead of all of them saying the same thing one after another.

You can consider the order of the interviews based on how you want to tell the story, but also how interesting they are. Sometimes someone we don’t know says something incredibly interesting and other times the President of the Nation says something rather dull, but is such an important figure, that it’s interesting anyway. It may be worth placing bits and pieces of the interesting people strategically in the beginning and the end for the reasons I’ve mentioned already – to attract attention and hook the listener and to leave something to think about and remember, but you can also try to evenly distribute them so that there isn’t a long dry phase somewhere in the middle.

I had dedicated an entire segment reminding you how important it is to be familiar with the necessary technology in order to achieve good results. Just before reaching the very end of your production task, make sure that you listen to it back and forth a good few times to identify the potential problems. Then fix them. Make sure that the audio levels are not jumping from high to low very quickly and dramatically. Use some compression and mix until you are happy with it. And don’t go too easy on yourself; it’d be shame to fall short on the last leg of your production mission.

The way your final piece will be, depends on you and how have you managed to work it. I can’t really tell you the way to do it, because, well, it depends, but I have tried to give you some ideas of what to consider. That, of course, goes for all the segments of this ebook.

But now, at this point, our documentary is done. How nice. We’ve done a good job, but no one, maybe outside of your group of friends and family, has heard it. The last chapter deals with how to get it placed and what other options there are, and should we actually rethink why we do this type of things completely.

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