Pitch to Outfront

Radio documentary tutorial

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Mini-Tutorial #1: A Documentary Tour
Take our tour through the steamy jungle of words and sound. There are eight pieces. All but one are excerpts of longer documentaries. We start with the familiar and move to the less familiar.

Listen to 'Rhodesian Farmers' : Runs 3:45min
"Sunday Morning" was a ground-breaking show that ran from 1976-1997 on CBC Radio One. It specialised in journalistic documentary story-telling or "field documentaries" which were often produced very quickly in response to current events. This is part of the first 'field documentary' "Sunday Morning" ever did. It was on the show's inaugural broadcast. I was freelancing in Southern Africa at that time. In 1976 the 'Field Doc' was new and fresh and quite a departure from the more linear, studio based 'essay' type of documentary. The field documentary is a series of connected scenes which collectively tells the story. This approach makes the producer think more as a dramatist, or film maker. The basic idea was to have about five scenes, each around 2 minutes and end up with a 10-12 minute piece. This scene, a visit to a farming couple in the front line of the bush war in Rhodesia, contains no sound effects. All the sounds existed on location. By taking the man and the wife out of their house and onto their farm the listener gets a much stronger sense of what their life is like. The dog, the birds, flies, security fence and servant were all there during the walkabout. Nothing was added. As someone once said, "Sound should be an extension of speech, not an illustration of it." I think you could say the dog in this context says 'danger,' the bird 'exotic,' and the flies 'a hot place.' If there was a script which mentioned them the effect would be ruined. It would be one of those tedious "cue the sound fx' routines - 'say dog, hear dog.' By the way, the mic bumps were because, through inexperience, I used a mic that gave a lot of handling noise.

Listen to 'Uganda Death Cell' : Runs: 4:00
As with the first excerpt there are no sound effects, only the naturally occurring sounds, including a much under-used sound, the sound of space. In this case the echo of the death cell. As with the Rhodesian farmers, the reporter has to find ways of helping the audience 'see the pictures,' by repeating or elaborating in the testimony of the interviewee, especially if the person's first language isn't English, always remembering that what might be an 'Invisible Commonplace' for the interviewee might be exactly the detail that brings the scene to life for the listener. In this case the details aren't exactly commonplace. This man is Reverend William George Lukwiya, who was imprisoned by Idi Amin for parking his car next to Amin's car in the same parking lot of the Apollo Hotel in Kampala. He was in Amin's death cells (an innocuous looking office building) for three months and amazingly got out alive.

Listen to 'The Trial of Jeremy Thorpe' : Runs 2:55min
Thorpe, a prominent British politician, was accused of hiring a hitman (Andrew Newton) to kill his alleged homosexual lover (Norman Scott). The key event was the bungled assassination attempt on a lonely moor in Southern England. Scott's Great Dane, Rinka, was shot by Newton, but Scott survived. North American documentary style has often been criticized as being too like the "extended news report," with a dominant narrator - the "lecture form" rather than the "story form." In the "story" approach, which is the approach most documentary makers in Europe adopt, everything comes from the people in the story. T hey provide the narration , the content and the style. This excerpt is the only part of a 38-minute documentary that broke standard "North American" form in that the event was described solely by the two participants. Two interviews recorded separately were combined.

Listen to 'The Tankard': Runs 6:30s
People in TV know that the most powerful of all material is "something is happening in front of the camera." It's the same in radio. This piece has something happening; a real-time auction. It takes the auctioneer 2:38 seconds to sell the tankard - that 'real time' segment is preserved in the documentary. I tried to give this piece the flavour of a little drama, hence the minimal scripting. Basically just notes on the cast of characters.

Listen to 'Freddie's Freedom': Runs 9:30s
This is part of a one-hour documentary on an ex-con trying to go straight. I met Freddie in a half-way house in my area of Toronto. We agreed to get together every couple of weeks from the day he left the half-way house until his warrant expiry date, December 21st, 1986, the day of the broadcast. So the documentary was recorded over a ten-month period. It took about 10 weeks of my time in total. After the first few minutes of the doc, the piece flows from scene to scene with no narration. This excerpt occurs about 20 minutes in and takes place in Freddie's home town, Windsor, Ontario.

Listen to 'Halifax Panhandlers': Runs 4:30s
Maite Ormachea of CBC Saint John recorded these panners in March 1991 as a training course project. She made a 35-minute piece and a 25-minute version was broadcast on Morningside. Like "Freddie," the style is based on scenes flowing one to the other with no narration. It's a good example of "something happening in front of the mic" and achieves what every good doc should try to do, namely take the listener into someone else's world and help you understand it. John Grierson, who is usually credited as the "father of the documentary" (as well as founder of the NFB) said "A 'slice of life' wasn't enough, a doc had to have either the power of poetry or the power of prophecy as well." I think this one is high

Listen to 'The Ice Edge': Runs 4:30s
A Danish documentary, set in the high arctic, re-done in English for Ideas. This should be listened to in stereo with good speakers because (halleluja!) it has wonderful sound, beautifully recorded on a Stereo Nagra (this was before DAT and mini-disc became popular). In spite of the narrator's imperfect English, the script is poetic, a style not favoured in North America, and very colourful. (I especially like the description of the "dogs howling like imprisoned souls in infinite need"). The quiet and simple style I think also fits the subject matter - an effective and respectful relationship between form and content.

Listen to 'Mennonites': Runs 3min
To finish, here's a burst of one of Glenn Gould's famous radio documentaries of the 1960's and 1970's. Glenn Gould did not compose much music in his life, but he did compose unusual radio documentaries based on Bach's polyphony. But instead of using instruments and singing voices, Gould composed using human speech as his raw material. All the overlaps and juxtapositions are very carefully planned to move from theme to theme as the exploration of what it means to be a Mennonite continues. Here is 3 minutes of it of a complicated montage that goes on for about ten minutes. Some people hate it, some feel it fits the jumble of competing ideas Mennonites have about themselves. Good luck!