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As a writer and field producer, I want to learn from #AnythingISee. Just watched this field piece from The Daily Show, and here’s what I’m thinking. 

1.) Can you handle that real shit? There’s a moment when Roy Wood is role playing a drug deal and he’s interrupted by one of the residents who’s not exactly feeling the role play. The resident says “there’s a bigger picture to Ceasefire than buying some damn weed around here man.” He goes on to tell Roy that unemployment and lack of opportunity is what is driving the violence. It’s a check-yo-self moment that reminds me of how residents reacted to Kamau Bell during his policing episode or Conan during his visit to Haiti. When you venture outside of interviewing villain politicians and you actually try to do stories that center marginalized groups, you open the door to seeing actual pain reveal itself to you in the field. It’s a pain that’s not here for games or witty banter. A pain that is skeptical of your reason for being in this neighborhood in the first place. And if you’re a great correspondent, you’re able to respond to that pain. And if you’re a great field producer, your able to design the whole piece to be able to absorb that shock. You’re able to design it so that the shock is actually what you’re trying to spotlight and feed into the empathy dispenser of the television.  2.) “Let’s make it into a show” is becoming cliché  It’s executed well here and Roy makes it funny. But as the whole field shifts more towards genre-based pieces, having your denouement/3rd act stunt be “people would care if only this were a slick show. We made a trailer!” is getting old. Best one I’ve seen is the Miami Vice bump out from Full Frontal. 

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As a writer and field producer, I want to learn from anything I see. Here’s the deal with this piece from The Daily Show. Genre is King  Similar to the Full Frontal model, they’re straying away from news parody and leaning into genre parodies. 

Kernels of Hope Seems their recipe is to pick one focused kernel of hope. Rather than picking a large, weighty issue like “Gun Control” or “Predatory Lending”, they pick one story about someone who is bucking the system and making room for others. Then they take that tasty piece of chocolate and wrap it in some genre pastry dough. Ronny is a Hustler Reminds me of his PizzeRONNY piece. He’s a correspondent who is always looking to make a buck.  

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Trump & Miss America

Trying to learn from #anythingIsee. This desk piece from The Daily Show’s Michelle Wolf is great. The obvious latenight joke is: Trump is dumb and unqualified. This one does a great job of having a fresh perspective: the women in Trump’s pageant’s are more knowledgeable than he is. There’s a subtle subversive tone to the piece reminding us how little respect and responsibility is given to these women (all of whom represent america far better than our president)  

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Moving Portrait

As a writer and filmmaker, I’m trying to learn from #anythingIsee. I just came across this doc short by Khalil Joseph and here’s what I’m thinking: 

This film manages to cover black cowboys without exotifying. Well, maybe there’s some exotification with girl wandering around. But otherwise, what a beautiful minimalist piece of work. When approaching field pieces, think about shooting subjects like you might shoot a portrait. Strip away all the VO and your video essay should still work on images alone. 

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Vice: Do Less

This vice piece is incredible, particularly because of the stunning minimalism in the correspondent’s questioning style. 

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Field: Thin Blue Evidence Line

As a writer and producer, I want to learn from #anythingisee. I just watched Sam Bee’s field piece “The Thin Blue Evidence Line” and here’s what I like. 

1.) Frame it like a doc feature 

They’re using this beautiful balanced frame because it’s a parody of Errol Morris’s “The Thin Blue Line.” But even if you’re not aware of that doc, it’s still a gorgeous frame and triggers your eye that you’re watching film, not broadcast news. 

Also dig how they frame their experts. 

Those backdrops make the subject almost look like an action figure with a setting painted on the cardboard backing behind them. I like how brief it is. Straight to camera. 

2.)  Every visual is joke territory 

The jokes here are a mix of Drunk-History-Style reenactment jokes and ridiculous tropes of the genre. It’s like Documentary Now, but with a purpose. 

3.) Aim for a turn that is both surprising and poetic 

Obviously, the producers of this piece knew that part of the story they wanted to capture was the wild and highly radicalized difference in the experiences oftwo men who were wrongly arrested for the same crime. They do this in a way that maintains the dignity of both subjects and hingers on a great piece of dialogue, “but things work out differently kinda based on your lot in life...”  With this poetic line, they move into this crossfade of the two mugshot images. This sequence is a cornerstone shot that summarizes the entire story. Look for shots like this as you produce. What is the one image or set of images that sums up the whole story? 

Remember to be brave and look for stories everywhere. Good hunting out there.  

[gocjhunt]

Field: Wanna Come Along

As a producer & writer, I want to learn from anything I see. I just watched the televangelists episode of Weird Weekends with Louis Theroux, and here’s what I’m thinking:

GO ON A RIDE WITH YOUR SUBJECT The doc I’m shooting has so many sit-down interviews. I’ve gotten used to that setup - used to thinking of the walk & talk as a cheap liability that will look shaky and be hard to edit. Somewhere along the way, I forgot how energizing it is to have your host follow the subject around. The tasks are simple. Follow them as they give you a tour of the office. Follow them as they put on their TV show. Follow them as they organize a rally that you suggested. However it turns out, you’re building rapport with the subject and getting constant new territory for discovery.  It sets up a journey. 

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By whose logic?

As a writer, I want to learn from anything I see.  I just watched episode 1 of Vice’s new series, Hate Thy Neighbor. Here’s what I’m thinking: 

WHAT DIDN’T WORK: Tell me how you’re not a hate group? 

As you can surmise, the show is an investigation into bigotry and extremism. Our host Jamali Maddix spends the episode looking into white supremacy (the backwoods kind, not the White House kind.) He makes the the same stop that everyone seems to make on their tour of white supremacy: a convo with the head of the NSM. After a swastika burning, our host confronts the NSM leader to ask him about something that is clearly bothering Jamali. The group’s online manifesto permits abortion in cases of rape, incest, and race mixing. Jamal asks, “My mom is white and my dad is black, and I find that hateful. How do you then stand here and say you’re not a hate group.” 

While you can tell that this question is personal and that Jamili is hurt, this moment is one of the least effective in the whole pilot. It’s not an invitation for his subject to soul search or confront contradictions. Instead, it’s an invitation to say all the white nationalist speaking points that he gets to repeat every time a film crew comes round looking to do an expose on white supremacy. It’s no sweat for the subject to answer. In fact, it’s free advertising for the NSM. The  boils down to: I think you’re offensive. Explain to me how you’re not offensive. If it feels familiar, it’s because it is the premise of every argument you’ve ever had on Facebook about guns or Trump or a woman’s right to choose. I think you’re wrong. Explain to me why I’m wrong about you being wrong. There’s no facts or objective ground to stand on in a fight like this. It’s a battle of speaking points. It invites you to fortify your position rather than question it.     The best interview questions are rooted in the objective. For example, W Kamau Bell has a similar but much more successful moment in his #UnitedShades pilot when he asks a white supremacist to explain to him why Bell’s mixed raced daughter would be unwelcome at the compound’s playground. Bell’s not asking his subject to justify why he’s not a bad man. Instead, he’s asking him to clarify the rules of white supremacy, and their shaky justification in the real world. However, neither of these moment is as effective as this next one in which Jamali pulls off an effective closer for the pilot - a moment that sticks with you.       

Worked: Tell me how you square those two things in your mind?  

After spending a day with a rank and file NSM member and his family, Jamali has an intimate moment with him in the car. This NSM member has two children from a previous marriage who happen to be half0Indian. Jamali asks him point blank to explain how he can ascribe to an ideology that asks the world to see his own biracial children as less-than. You can feel the weight of the silence. It’s a silence filled with the inaudible clicking of gears inside the subject’s head - a temporary shudder in the machine as it is forced to confront a contradiction in his world view. While many by-your-own-logic arguments are self congratulatory and ineffective, this one works. It’s a question asked in good faith, a weapon unsheathed only after a day of non-judgmental rapport building. Before I go, can you just help me understand how can hold these two thoughts in your head?

Make your own questioning as artful as this last example. You’re not looking to win a fight on screen. You don’t spend all that time sneaking behind enemy lines only to blow it all in a fist fight. Instead, you’re there to gather intel. At minimum, you can show the viewer a never-before-seen world. At best, you can humanize, complicate, and give your subject a chance to covert.   

I’m not interested in arguments that feel like a Facebook comment war. Nor do I want to come to your farm and watch you shoot guns and then make a bunch of in-studio jokes about how scared I was and how bad guns are. Instead I’m interested in tipping points. How do you get someone to change their mind? How hard do we all work to keep out information that jeopardizes our carefully constructed world view? It’s like watching a child protect a sand castle from the  tide. Don’t ruin this, please, its all I have. And whatever your views, we all recognize that feeling. We’ve been that kid on the beach. And for this reason, when TV is able to uncover one of these moments, it always feels so human. We don't need to watch someone walk through the door; we just need to see what they do when presented with the choice. The sound of those gears clicking, the machine shuddering and knocking as it tries to overcome a jam - that’s enough for me. 

It feels like the best TV for this era reminds viewers: you have a choice. You can always change your mind.           

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Democracy Handbook: Trump As a writer, I want to learn from anything I see. I just watched Democracy Handbook, and here's what im thinking. Works: Burden of Proof • Love his MOS section at the Trump rally. He has a great technique of letting the burden always rest on the respondent. - Trump is going to make America Great? Cool. Tell me how he's going to do it? - You admire his business successes? What are some of those successes? I love how light on your toes that is. He's not battling them (my facts v your facts). Instead, he's letting ignorance and misinformation bring itself down. Strive for as short responses as possible "How?" "Explain that to me" Doesn't Work: The tone still doesn't work for me. The observations work - that Trump is like a middle eastern dictator, that our love for him has everything to do with branding. But the perspective isn't clear. I suppose it's a misplaced celebration of all of our shittiest things. But it's become detached from his mission to find what is great about democracy. As he praises Flint as a perfect unwelcome mat for immigrants or Guns as the ultimate cool freedom, I don't believe him. I know he's being tongue in cheek. But what for? Us liberals already knew those things were shitty. And conservatives would dismiss the argument as being reductive. So, at the end of the day, what have we accomplished? The voice of this show seems almost better suited as a desk piece on the Daily Show w/ Trevor running straight man.

[gocjhunt]

democracy handbook: Guns

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWXVb07whOU&feature=share In his quest to discover what makes america so great, Bassem turns to the one right that makes us all equal: the right to bear arms. What's so great about buying a gun and why do we care about the second amendment. Works: The frame works. In a land of inequality, the freedom we sure want to enforce is the right to own a gun. Doesn't work: He asks a legit question about our gun hunger. And instead of digging in deeper, he takes a detour to cover a wacky business that sells guns and jewelry. The heart's not there.

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Back in the Bunker

As a writer, I want to learn from anything I see. I just watched Full Frontal w/ Sam Bee (Feb 1) and here’s what I’m thinking. 

Since one of their earliest field pieces visiting a Syrian refugee camp, I’ve been certain that Full Frontal is revolutionizing the late night field piece. Because Full Frontal’s joke isn’t about parodying network news tropes, they get to experiment with other tools. They dig into the cinematic, they experiment with having an unseen narrator, and here, they create a superstructure. Many forget that the Upright Citizens Brigade show on comedy central had a similar super structural element: it was hosted not from a stage, but from the UCB’s secret underground lair where they hatched chaos to unleash upon the world. 

Subworlds  Here, they’ve created “The Bunker” a space hidden in the wall of a spin class - a panic room where Sam can have experts come and equip her with the background info and clarity needed to battle the ever-crazier world. It’s similar to something we’ve been playing in developing our next show: building spaces and characters that exist within the world of the show, yet are neither the studio nor the field.   

Decode & Explain Rather than skewering the media (think The Daily Show holding Fox pundits accountable) or mocking the powerful and hypocrytical (think any 2016 joke relating to Trump’s hand size or skin color) it seems the renewed purpose of Trump-era satire is really just to sift through Trump’s bullshit, and make plain to Americans what is happening.

Sometimes it’s: Boil Downs

...where Bee simplifies the admins argument to it’s core. I still need to be able to do this re: the legal argument for keeping confed monuments. This also reminds me of Oliver breaking down all of Snowden’s complex whistleblowing to a simple question: can the government see my dick? This complicated thing - what does it essentially boil down to? 

Other times it’s: Illustrated Guides 

Battling the admin’s desire to conflate immigrants and refugees as the same thing. Reminds me of Sikh vs Sheik on Totally Biased. Sometimes people just need to be educated. 

Lastly, she uses: A Historical Pattern

This was the dopest - reminding us that Trump’s “trojan horse” rhetoric around  refugees is the same language used by FDR when denying Jewish families entrance into the US as they fled nazi Europe.  I have a feeling this last method is going to be one of our most used tools during these next four years. Hey everyone, we’ve been here before. And as the history books show, shit did not go well!!    

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Inauguration - Full Frontal

I’m trying to get a sense of how different shows covered the inauguration. #latenightinauguration. I’m interested in the angles shows take - especially if you are Sam Bee or Oliver and have a significant delay in getting to air after all the nightly late night shows. How do you come to spot the thing that no one else has time or attention to talk about? How do you find the meat still left on the bone. 

FULL FRONTAL EP 1/25/16 Angles: • “This Moment is Your Moment.” To me or to this kid [OTS Nazi kid singing]   • The Crowd Size - both how much space there is and how sad it is that he insists on a different reality • The Inauguration Concert. “It was surreal, and frankly, not very funny” Interesting that the show pulls up short on focusing on the actual proceedings of the inauguration and goes toward the jucier celebration the night before.   - Poorly disguised Vladimir Putin singing at the event. - How insane it is that Toby Keith sang a song about lynching. 

-ACT BREAK- 

• Trump at the CIA - how weird it is that he brought a pep squad. Let it go already. So much empty space that ____   • Spicer Speaks - “It’s just unbelievably frustrating to me told it’s just not big enough.” Bee uses a great segway - the type of thing I want to get better at writing “If one unsatisfied woman makes you feel sad, I got bad news for you [throw to women’s march]    • The women’s march - All you have to do to get white women to show up to a protest is give them a craft [OTS great Black Lives Matter joke]  • Fox and conservatives not “getting” the women’s march • Conservatives trying to play down how it’s a global phenomenon  - Bumper: GW Sirens sing the Women’s March Anthem (crazy how Sam Bee only does musical guests when it means something. This made me tear up. It’s solidarity via a musical guest. She did the same thing the day after the election) 

-ACT BREAK- 

• Trump voter’s joy (via one of Full Frontal’s austere european film field pieces). The biggest takeaway from this field piece is how much it helps to have a strong narrative voice. They actual catch from the interviews is incredibly small, but strung together with the narrator, it works. 

[gocjhunt]

The Jump

As a writer, I want to learn from #anythingisee. This was such masterful storytelling. Yes, it's gorgeous shot composition. However, the selection of shots and the order is just so compelling for telling the whole story of how this kid reached this moment. I want to remember that type of brevity and power when I'm composing shorts, and when I'm figuring out how to shorten my doc. 

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Photo and Feel

As a writer, I want to learn from anything I see. And I just watched these two shorts on Vimeo by Colby Moore. 

and 

I’ve been so lost in the world of satire and message comedy that I had lost sight of what art feels like. With Moore’s Midnight in America, I expect him to be hitting us over the head with a message - about doom, and resistance, and the ugliness of a Trump world. But the view feels more objective. A snapshot. My co-writer, James, has been telling me for a while that he loves when a doc feels like it’s just taking a snapshot. Just a freeze frame of where we are at in America. CJ, don’t forget the beauty, movement, and mood of these two videos. There’s more than the argument. 

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Break Bread

As a writer, I want to learn from anything I see. I just watched Weediquette episode 1.4 (Marijuana Migrants) and here’s what I’m thinking. 

If you can set your interview around a meal, do it!  An astounding amount of this show involves the host, Krishna, sharing a meal with his interviewees. Often, he begins the interview while he helps them prepare the meal. There’s nothing more humanizing and equalizing than the act of breaking bread. There’s an intimacy to it; a lowering of defenses. 

When you’re dealing with multiple interview subjects, the also meal draws out the dynamics between them. In the scene above, the meal - even in just the simple chopping of tomatoes - gives us insight into the relationship between two aspiring weed entrepreneurs who have become roommates. 

More unexpectedly, the imagery from the meal provides a sort metaphorical language to underscore plot or theme. 

Let’s examine this scene in which Krishna shares a meal with a Texas family who had to move to Colorado just to give their daughter access to cannabis to help control her seizures. We see the husband, John, cooking at the grill alone. Meanwhile, his wife informs Krishna that her husband may have to leave Colorado if he can’t find work here. Such a beautiful, heartrending use of B-roll.     

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What are you so afraid of?

As a writer, I want to learn from anything I see. I just watched the NYT Op-Doc “The Many Sad Fates of Mr. Toledano” and here’s what I’m thinking

Technical Takeaway: Film the whole room. So much of this film is about Toledano’s family and background. Newer to directing, I would never think to film framed photos in the subject’s house during the interview. But it’s essential. The room is the unnamed character. It provides great coverage, open doors, and potential metaphors to underscore whatever you find in the dialogue of the interview. 

Craft Takeaway: Find the fear.  As I develop my new show, I’m obsessed with the question asked by the two leads in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay while they come up with their first comic superhero: what is the why? A good character has a compelling a why? Batman seeks justice because his parents were murdered. It feels like so much of documentary is about the why. Why are you doing this? Why do you think the way you do? And it is only now occurring to me that a shortcut to this question could be: what are you so afraid of? In Toledano’s case, it’s his uncertain future. More specifically: being old and alone. Isn’t that all of our deepest fear? His nightmares are our nightmares. When writing and shooting, look for the fear. Because a master of sniffing it out in the characters you write and the real people you interview. What, sir or madame, are you so terribly afraid of?  

[gocjhunt]

Show Posters: United Shades

As I develop my own show, I’m thinking of show posters - of the ways an image and a tag line can convey the whole show. Love this from Kamau Bell’s United Shades of America. You see it, and you just get it.