Foreign Correspondent

Write a personal reflection on a single camera production shown on free to air television. Include a researched observation with references.

Foreign Correspondent is one of a trilogy of established current affairs shows produced and broadcast by the ABC, along with Four Corners and Australian Story. The show draws on an extensive network of overseas staff - more than any other Australian network - and a Sydney-based research and production team. In the last 14 years they've produced more than 1300 reports from over 160 countries.

This week the show ran only two stories in their usual 45 minute slot, missing the 'soft' news style Postcard segment but giving extended attention to the political career of former cricketer Imran Khan and the impact of gas and oil extraction on Russia's northern Pacific island of Sakhalin.

Journalist Peter Lloyd must have taken every available opportunity in his interview with Imran Khan, from northern Pakistan through the Shaukat Khanum Cancer Hospital and then at Khan's home. I counted quotes from seven different settings and also an interview with Najam Sethi, editor of Pakistan's Daily Times. In addition, archival footage of Khan with former wife Jemima Goldsmith and his cricket career was used. The centre piece was an interview with Khan in a non-descript room, possibly a hotel, using that ABC trademark of a lamp in the background to balance the frame. The camera operator was Wayne McAllister.

Foreign Correspondent's contributor Eric Campbell presented the story on the energy industry that has rapidly developed in Sakhalin, north of Japan. He spoke with locals and also foreign workers, such as Ian Craig, the head of the Shell/Mitsui project. It was interesting that only Craig got his name written on screen but this may be because of the need for subtitles. It appeared Campbell was able to interview in Russian. The camera operator was Geoffrey Lye.

There was a much more pronounced style of editing in this second story. Where the first was quite naturalistic in presenting images to match the narrative with an unrushed pace of edits; the second used techniques such as timelapse to show the speed of the development of infrastructure and used a soundtrack in the style of Phillip Glass - a reference to the work of Godfrey Reggio. I noticed one shot using slow motion, as a group of workers walked from a construction site, many others were in fast motion. In parts and near the end the edits were very quick, again contributing to the sense of speed in construction of the Sakhalin energy industry and the disruption of life on the island. Archival footage was also used, such as images from after a Korean passenger jet was shot down over the island by the former Soviet Union in the 1980s.

I sent an email to Foreign Correspondent with a bunch of questions to see if I could learn more for this entry. Here is their response:

Dear Jason

Sorry we don't have time to answer all your questions. However generally our shoots take from a week to ten days. Sometimes two weeks if it is in a remote place or a story that means going to a number of different locations. A postcard (final cut around 5-7 mins) would be two or three days. Editing generally takes two weeks for a lead story, though sometimes for very topical issues we turn them around faster than that (but work over weekends and overnight).

The Sakhalin story was filmed on an Sx betacam and the sound gear was standard tv sound gear. There was around 10 hours of tape to edit from. The reporter is away on another shoot so I can't ask him how long it took to research. That's probably an impossible question to answer anyway because generally all of us research a number of stories at the same time and we are not just focusing on one story. Sometimes we spend months researching a story, but we are doing lots of other things simultaneously, such as logging tapes, supervising edits, writing scripts and organising graphics etc.

Regards
Marianne Leitch

Foreign Correspondent

Highlights

• Slomo Video, a festival with an interesting aesthetic: 100 one minute slow motion videos
• Video mashup: Ten Things I Hate About Commandments
• Article discussing why TV has the edge on film
• High Definition (cons)piracy?
  

More arse licking

The new copyright proposal from Attorney General Phil Ruddock has been widely discussed as a step forward. It accepts videotaping from TV and even means that ripping your CDs to your iPod is no longer a criminal act. However, it also contains proposals that have been widely condemned and rejected in the US:

It's funny: the Hollywood cartel couldn't get the US to adopt the Broadcast Flag, so they went and sold this bill of dubious goods to Australians. You'd think Australia would be smarter than that: it's pretty sad to be the easy-lay nation that Hollywood turns to when it can't convince America to put out.

Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising. The Free Trade Agreement (FTA) set new ground for ensuring the influence of US goods in a foreign market, including the rights of cultural products like film and music and television. The Leader of the Opposition at that time, Mark Latham, called the Government "arse lickers".

One of the key issues in Ruddock's proposal is that the 'fair use' provisions now set personal use as a single viewing and attach penalties for not observing this. It means you can timeshift a program once, such as recording with a VCR, but you have to delete the videotape afterwards. It looks silly until you consider videotapes are on the way out and digital devices are taking their place - devices which may enforce this silly law.

As a parent I can imagine the result of letting a child watch a program and then having to tell them they can't watch it a second time.

Maybe we're seeing a paradigm shift in the way consumers view content. Consider how digital rights management (DRM) is incorporated into music and video files and players to limit their use. It's another step along the path from how DVDs won't let you skip the copyright warning and how knows where it'll end up.

..Law allows people to make copies of parts of copyrighted works for the purposes of critiquing or reviewing them.

"That's an exemption thwarted by DRM systems," she said. "The technologies are extending beyond the law they are supposed to uphold."

Increasingly, said Ms Charman, consumers were bumping up against DRM technologies as they use digital media such as downloaded songs.

She said that DRM was less about protecting copyright and more about creating a system in which people rent rather than own the media they spend money on.

"We think people rightly feel that once they buy something, it stays bought," she said.

Maybe before long we won't own anything more than the experience of it - after all, it's the thing that attracted the salesmen who established Hollywood. I forget the studio boss who said "Movies are the only thing you own after you've sold it" but the principle of owning a creative work has seen any number of artists shafted from deciding the fate of the fruits of their labours. Just ask John Fogerty. It's worth noting another piece of recent legislation before the federal Australian parliament proposed that artists collect a percentage of the resale of their works but this was knocked back.

I wonder how long before TV stations are undermined by producers seeking a greater share of profits by selling programs directly to consumers. Wouldn't it be interesting to subscribe to a show, receive it like a podcast and know you're directly contributing to it's continued existence? I've read fans of Star Trek franchises raised money to see them continue. A similar notion has been used to great effect by Crikey when they've been faced with a lawsuit. And, being appreciative of their efforts, I've handed over money every time.

Anyway, before I digress too far on my usual rant about online delivery, one of the key things missing from Australian copyright that's ingrained in the US bill of rights is free speech and especially the role of parody. Australia has provisions for comment as 'fair use' but, as I understand it, the use of copyright protected material for satire is still contentious enough that The Panel was taken to the High Court. The judgment came in their favour but it still means no one is likely to make something like The House of Cosbys in our fair land. (It's also a shame Bill Cosby has shown himself to have no sense of humour, Rolf Harris didn't take The Goodies to court when they used a similar plot device all those years ago.)

Another development that blurs copyright is mashing original material, sometimes from more than one source. It's an extreme extension of postmodernism and the freeplay of ideas in unlimited semiosis. Where art would think itself to be clever in alluding to a quotation or reference, a mashup like Brokeback to the Future gives almost full realisation to the idea there's a homoerotic subtext.



It's clever but would it qualify as fair use? This is where I think Australia's copyright is lacking. It's potentially threatening that we don't have a bill of rights but I think the lack of laws to allow subversion for comment are thin skinned. It's like how our defamation laws favour the claimant in that it's not in the interests of the powers that be to change the situation.

More importantly, it fails to recognise that consumers have changed the way the want to enjoy media. Passive viewing is so 20th century. Here's a great article on the issues surrounding this phenomenon. It is especially relevant as the UK copyright laws are similar to Australia's.

It's a shame the DRM options being pursued by vertically integrated pop culture/technology companies and now reflected in the proposed changes to copyright law all limit the ability to repeat or 'on broadcast' media such as television, video or music. Peer to peer marketing is all the rage at the moment for good reason. The commercial power of material with high production values relies on creating a mass market to attract mass market advertising. Without a large audience we may as well admit most of the stuff on television, the internet and in the stores will be American as the Australian market is being swamped by cheaper imports.

Mark Latham was right when he called the government "a conga line of suckholes". That might seem nasty but I reckon it's justified with this quote from my hero Lawrence Lessig:

From the beginning, government and government agencies have been subject to capture. They are most likely captured when a powerful interest is threatened by either a legal or technical change. That powerful interest too often exerts its influence within the government to get the government to protect it. The rhetoric of protection is of course always public spirited; the reality is something different. Ideas that were as solid as rock in one age, but that, left to themselves would crumble in another, are sustained through this subtle corruption of our political process. (pp.6-7)

In this context it's interesting to look at who has made submissions to the Attorney General regarding copyright reform (and also the changes to the copyright technological provision measures required by 2007 under the FTA, which mean you can't hack a gaming machine you own - not just for playing pirated games but uses like cheap personal computing).
I was pleased to see CSU amongst submissions to the recent discussion paper, stating the following:

Charles Sturt University’s view is that the Act should be amended to allow format shifting for non-commercial, including educational, use of material that has been legally acquired.
[...]
Charles Sturt University’s view is: that the transformative use of works should be part of either a specific exception, or of a more general fair use exception; that specific attention ought to be given to the issue of orphaned works; and that no new statutory licences are necessary.

The first statement pushes the answer for timeshifting technologies, like VCRs and the new generation of digital recorders; while the second tackles the potential for us to comment on a commercial work through mashing or manipulating it.

The key issue throughout all of this is that copyright is not being defended by artists, it's being tightened by the companies that distribute their works. There's an industry built around hyping, manufacturing and delivering art to consumers and it's threatened by the consumers becoming artists in their own right now the technology exists to bypass other avenues. You no longer have to build a reputation as an artist to display your clever appropriation of a cultural product and you no longer have to get a record contract to have your songs heard by the masses and get screwed like John Fogerty. And, as Hugh said in the last week of term, you no longer need television stations to broadcast your work. We have the tools and, if you've got the skills, what are you waiting for?

STOP THE REPRESS!

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Newsflash

Some interesting links:

• Experiments with one second advertisements
• Soderbergh trials more alternatives to Hollywood
• NBC counter viral videos by providing material online
• Seeking 50,000 investors for a million pound film (and offering input)

Wow

You Tube is going to make TV Production blogs a lot more interesting!

It's all news to me

Compare and contrast a news story from local news with one from national news. Pay particular attention to duration, composition and technical elements. Make comment about the overall difference of the news stories.

Weeks ago I managed to get in front of the TV to see the local Prime news in Wagga and the ABC national news. The lead stories on both followed similar formats in having an introduction from the news reader, an address from the journalists direct to camera at or near the end and both were around 2-3 minutes in length.

Prime followed the delay of a retirement village development in Henty due to a protected pine tree. That this story also made the front page of the local newspaper says a lot about the focus of the local media and their demographic.

Reporter Hayley Corbett gathered responses from four people, three were elderly investors outraged that a tree was threatening their futures, and the fourth was a phone interview with a spokesperson for the catchment authority. There didn't appear to be any file footage used, none was acknowledged at least.

The piece suffered from a hum throughout, perhaps an unbalanced audio cable, it didn't surface again in the bulletin. The vision relied on a number of shots of the location of the proposed village, the reviled tree, the streets of Henty and the interview subjects. The composition used mid-to-close shots and pans through the cutaways, starting and ending on a held shot.

The ABC led with the story of Private Kovco leaving Iraq. Matt Brown's reporting included an interview with an ADF commander and vision of the military send off. The camera was set up a long way back from the proceedings, picking out a range of shots of the soldiers attending and the coffin by using a telephoto lens. Given the glare of Iraq they struggled a bit to get detail of the priest waving his hands over the casket in the Hercules' bay but they were successful in getting close ups of Australian and British soldiers looking contemplative. There was a dynamic moment when American black hawk helicopters took off nearby although it seemed a little extraneous to the story.

The editing differed from Prime in using static shots but the telephoto lens would have made it difficult and probably a bit wrong to use pans. That sort of movement might have come across as a bit disrespectful for the tone of the piece too I guess.

The resources of the ABC were demonstrated when, after Matt Brown made his address to camera, the story continued as Juanita outlined the response in Kovco's Victorian hometown. There was footage of his former school and soundbites from his former headmaster and then a press conference in Canberra by the Prime Miniature John Howard.

This week I observed an interesting comparison between two rival live broadcasts, Today and Sunrise, both covering the unfolding drama from Beaconsfield. The approach of the two shows was very different, despite the similarities in format and in using an outdoor set. Today used a telephoto lens flattening a small section of the top of the mine and warm lighting with almost black background in the early morning, while Sunrise had a wider angle showing more of the axle above the mineshaft in the background and less lighting, allowing light from the sky.

Both had live interviews and no doubt Today thought they had scored by securing the father of trapped miner Brant Webb, while Sunrise spoke to an ambulance officer. However, Webb senior was not particularly expressive and Karl doggedly attempted to have him open up for 15 minutes, eventually succeeding in getting footage of him wiping away tears with inane statements like "he must come from good stock". I wasn't surprised to see Nine were using edited snippets of the interview in the news bulletin that night but it still seemed like ordinary television with little to say other than the obvious. And it seemed Nine were approaching the event like a funeral.

In contrast, Sunrise collected a succinct report of the miners current circumstances from someone who had talked to them and could detail how they were holding up and the few luxuries they had been able to receive. Sunrise also managed to fit another story into the same amount of time, including an interview with Peter Beattie about an obesity summit in Queensland.

It's no wonder Sunrise has taken Today's audience. As much as the events at Beaconsfield are highly dramatic, a lengthy and somewhat manipulative live interview on a news/entertainment show first thing in the morning is not great television. One wonders whether the combined coverage of the networks of this lengthening story is approaching overkill but perhaps I'd look unkind in saying I'm over it already.