© By Jeff Gere, 2018 STF Presenter

(Originally Published October 2002 in
The Museletter)

Like it or not, television is the most pervasive form of storytelling on the planet. Commercial television uses humanity’s love for stories to hook our attention so that we’ll watch commercials and buy products. The explosion in cable channels with various entertainment themes offers opportunities to more independent producers. Public Television serves a different educational vision. How can you, we, I and the storytelling community put our fine programs before the television viewer? Why do we want to?

“The first impediment is self-imposed.” Helen Keller

QUESTION: Is storytelling content to be a small folk phenomena, a “nice” librarian’s craft performed for children because it’s “good for them”, but only mildly attractive to the masses? ANSWER: Yes, I think many storytellers see our art form in this way. They feel storytelling is not compatible with mass media attention. RESULT: Our public audiences are fairly puny, storytelling is not an entertainment option for most, and we have not penetrated the mass-mind. Storytelling remains invisible to the mainstream.

I do not hold this view of storytelling. I believe storytelling is the root of literature, theatre, and culture. I believe it provokes synaptic activity leading to higher cognitive functions in one’s ability to imagine and conceptualize. I believe the world needs storytelling and that the storytelling community offers content rich mana to a starving fast-food public. I believe storytelling helps people understand one another. Storytelling expands the heart. I believe television is a way to bring storytelling and its benefits to a world that doesn’t know that they will LOVE it. So how can this be done?

MY JOURNEY: In Hawaii, my answer has come through Olelo (a Hawaiian word meaning “to speak”) Television. Public Access TV exists to extend the first amendment right of freedom of speech to everyman. Access Television here is well funded by agreement between the State and Oahu’s local cable station. Olelo provides equipment, a studio, editing bays, and training of every kind. It airs programming on four channels constantly. To share and extend the quality performances featured at my annual Talk Story Festival, Hawaii’s largest and oldest storytelling and oral history celebration, I created Story TV in 1990. Below I share my reflections on this programming over 25 years with the hopes of inspiring and assisting your own efforts.

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY

The Good News: If you put it on TV, people see it. It is NEVER wasted effort. Years of feedback from strangers have convinced me of this truth and the value of the effort. Live performances at my Festival have an energy and vitality absent from studio performances. It’s fun for viewers to join the audience! And stories well told grip human attention. And using several cameras gives the TV audience a better view of a show than any seat in the house.

The Bad News: It is difficult to create an exceptional video of live storytelling due to several issues:
1) The TV viewer is accustomed to storylines that unfold at a faster pace than occurs in most oral storytelling narratives. TV occurs in the midst of home life. If it doesn’t grab the viewer, they switch the channel. Following a story(teller) requires committed attention.
2) TV shows are choreographed for active switching of angles and views. Most live storytelling performances are not devoted to the camera, but to the audience. At the Talk Story Festival, I don’t allow the camera to intrude too much, too often onto the stage. This means the cameras record, but don’t often have the powerful view of the teller talking directly into the camera.

The Ugly: 1) Television is a “cold” medium. People on TV lose life. Performances easily become flat.
2) How do you retain the vitality of a live, intimate tell which exercises the listener’s imagination when you use a medium that eliminates much of what makes the live telling successful and special? How can storytelling “hold the viewer”?

So what about you? Don’t worry- just start. You get better at it. It’s an adventure! You have crews for publicity, staging, sales, etc. ‘Video’ is just another group to integrate. Over the years, I’ve found that giving more attention to the TV production has raised the quality of the story videos tremendously.

TECHNICAL: The simplest form of documentation: aim and shoot a video camera at a subject. Pretty quickly, you become aware of the composition of the background, the lighting, and quality of the sound (audio). Each of these is a specialty. For the Talk Story Festival, I improve the marginal ‘theatre’, giving the stage a great “look”. I add a second and third camera to triple available views, each offering a different angle and focus (wide general shot from the center, close-ups from the sides).

PROBLEM: To record an entire show, each camera needs lots of tape (or a hard-drive now) and you (or someone) must merge (edit) those three views together into one show. This is time-consuming.
SOLUTION: use a portable ‘switcher’ (or studio or Olelo’s van). Here each camera’s view comes to a central panel, and the director picks from the various angles. A good director can tell the camera people (via headphones) to zoom in and out, to really compose with these three eyes for a variety of looks, even bleeding one view over another live. In this type of ‘shoot’, the editing is done ‘live’, so one tape (hard drive) holds the whole long show. We’ve done this for years with the Talk Story Festival. The brains of this operation is the Director- I choose and pay them well. For the best sound, we use lavalier mics and run the voice directly into the video board (with a person monitoring audio) and then it runs out into the house.

PROBLEM: How do you learn to do all that?
SOLUTION: Well, technology can be learned, and you do find help if you look for it. At Olelo, they have volunteer lists, the community college has video classes eager to get experience, and there are people at the studio who LIVE for TV…. go make friends and invite their help. The junior college is another valuable resource.

GRAPHICS: I do not create titles for the live show, since nothing shot is simultaneously aired. I’ve created an introductory ‘Opening’ sequence for all the series of storytelling shows for the year. In the editing bay, I follow the opening with the title of that particular show (a teller, or theme with a collection of tellers). Credit rolls at the end of the show also serve the entire series.

EDITING: Mac’s iMovie can serve many beginning needs, but I’m completely spellbound by the digital editing possibilities presented by Final Cut Pro (version 10 by now). It’s special effects (Chroma-key, tinting, bending and warping, and coloring the image) have added new dimensions of creative visual augmenting to the performances that enrich the narrative further, stimulating the imagination rather than illustrate everything (as is often done in commercial, big-budget TV).

For EXAMPLE, the Devil appears in the mirror as a beautiful girl combs her hair. A gold frame serves as the mirror, and I move from one side to the other being both characters. Editing this story, when I was the Devil, I added a reddish tint. I also added a slight rolling distortion, which was intriguing to watch. Same tell, but the effects subtly extended the illusion.

GET STARTED: RECORD THYSELF is my First Law! Any soundboard with a headphone jack can help you record the concert: just run a wire into your computer (with an audio recording program. Audacity is free and will work very well for a long time). The audio from video fed a radio series in Honolulu for years.
Video yourself using a phone, put it on iMovie and start, start, start. Uploading to YouTube is easier & easier.

YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT IS COMING EXAMPLE #1: A man younger than I am wanted to do historical and storytelling walking tours for tourists in Waikiki using mobile phone Apps. I found a ton of recordings (many unreleased) to put under the title: “Supernatural Hawaii: Sharks, Stones & Bones!” If I had not been driven to record my work, it would have been much much harder to pull it together, and I am proud of the set, and the experience visitors will have with me (and I don’t have to show up!).
EXAMPLE #2: I just returned from a tour of Taiwan. After the 10 days of shows in Taichung, I headed south to a Shadow Puppet Museum in Kaohsiung. I was greeted at the reception table by an assistant who was glowing, having watched my shadow shows on YouTube. I will likely return to perform there. See?

RECENT STORY TV EFFORTS: I retired from my position as Drama Specialist of Oahu’s Parks Department to end 2014. Since then, I’ve toured internationally a good bit. But when home, I’ve produced YouTube Series of short stories for my visiting friends: specifically Margaret Read MacDonald and UK’s Craig Jenkins. In each, it was a 3-camera studio shoot with a Director (live switching). Each teller came with a few hours of shortish tales. We took breaks occasionally to change clothing or backdrops and I told them to look and talk into the camera with the red light. After, I showed them to each teller and added the intro and exit graphics. They came out well, giving each of them quality videos of their work.
YOU can do that too. Go Look these videos up on YouTube, and any of the many, many clips of my storytelling. Come join me in the STF Workshop on Story TV where we will map out how you can get yourself some good video too!

HOPEFUL VISION: I sense a major storytelling series is coming with a national distribution, introducing solo storytelling, the world’s treasure chest of narratives, and their cultures to the massive public audience. I intuit that YES, there IS an audience, which doesn’t find much to watch on television now.

Want to learn more about combining storytelling and television? Take Jeff’s workshop, The How, What, & Whys of STORY TELEVISION, (Saturday, March 24 from 3:30 – 5:00 pm) at Sharing the Fire 2018. Visit the STF Conference Details page to register for the conference.  Want to share your own experiences on this topic?  Leave a comment.

JEFF GERE is a professional storyteller in Honolulu, Hawaii. He created and directs the Talk Story Festival (Hawaii’s largest and oldest storytelling celebration) for 27 years. He has produced a public radio series, has several CDs, and television programs. He now tours internationally and still tells to 10,000 children on Oahu each summer. Write him at jeffgere@lava.net