Creating a Documentary Style for:

Narration Track: We use a narrator to advance the story, tie up the lose ends, give informational titbits, make linkages, set up voices from the past, and to allow us to offer compressed material that would otherwise take too long to explain. We were pleased when our first choice as narrator - Linden MacIntyre, multi-Gemini award-winning host of CBC's The Fifth Estate - after reading the script, eagerly agreed to lend his voice. "It's an excellent script. I wouldn't do it if it wasn't. I started to read and couldn't put it down until I had read all 50 pages." (Linden had previously narrated our multi-award winning one-hour documentary "My Land is My Life" in 1985.)

Voices: We are using "voices from the past", gleaned from diaries, letters, and books of people who were actually there during the events they describe.

Period Music: To give the viewer a better feel for the period, we use songs, tunes, and band music from the late Victorian and early Edwardian Age. We rarely use synthesized music as it is not in period.

Period Recordings: We are using numerous recordings actually made in Canada during the Anglo-Boer War era. They are the earliest recordings made in Canada. They feature singers and bands popular at the time including: Harry Macdonough, Harold Jarvis, Henry Burr, the Haydn Quartet, the Kilties, and the Sousa Band. The viewer will hear the exact same recordings listened to by patriotic Canadians on their Gramophones as they sent their boys to war in 1899.

The songs include: Goodbye Dolly Gray, All Through the Night, Where is My Wandering Boy Tonight, God be With You Till We Meet Again, Nearer My God to Thee , Rule Britannia, When the Roll is Called Up Yonder, Oh Canada, and Shall We Meet Beyond the River (demo left c. 1900 by the Haydn Quartet, which we play over the British retreating across the Tugela River after the disastrous defeat at Spion Kop). The famous Kilties Band from Belleville, ON, plays Canadian medleys including the Boer War Canadian national anthem, the Maple Leaf Forever.

Acoustic Instrumentation: To more properly give the flavour of the Anglo-Boer War we are using musical instruments in common use at the time, including cello, violin, viola, concertina, harmonica, piano, English Horn, etc. and spice the sound track with traditional bugle calls that were used to regulate life on Anglo-Boer War battlefields and camps, including: the Charge, the Alarm, Officer's Call, Fatigue Call, Last Post, Reveille, Retreat.

Audio Presentation: We use ambient sound behind every picture in the show, to give a more intimate connection between the viewer and the images.

PROGRAM PRESENTATION:

Documentary Form: We decided to innovate by creating our documentary with "modules," creating the main show by assembling many small audio-video story packages, each with its own theme, start, middle, and end. There are 43 modules in our program, each about four to five minutes in length. Each tells a unique story and is hooked into the overall program theme. And each is introduced with a motion picture, multi-dimensional slate.

We Feature Artistic Informational Slates: To improve television communication and arouse viewer interest, we use 43 different slates like the one above introducing the section dealing with the Boer invasions of British Cape Colony, in Oct. 1899, leading to the sieges of three British towns. Col. Robert Baden-Powell became world-famous for out holding out in Mafeking for 7 months, until rescued by Canadian guns. His rare parian bust rotates above.

American documentarian Ken Burns is widely regarded as introducing chapter headings to documentaries. More accurately, he popularized modular program construction. He merely used slates to flag his modules, neat packages of program information that had a theme, a start, middle, and an end. He suggested that this is a better filmic form than the run-on sentence, created by other film auteurs, which is only cut off by TV commercials.

But Ken Burns' slates were simply a catchy phrase - evocative of his modules - written in white letters on a black background, harkening back to silent movie titles. The CBC History Series used titles like those used in camera club "slide shows," that were no improvement, simply adding some small colour pictures to the Burns title phrase, and setting the whole adrift in surrounding sea of black.

We believed that these slate models could stand major improvements on numerous levels. We decided, rather than mystifying the viewer with a slate, to design ours to inform and help orient the viewer to the unfolding story. We believe that by creating bite sized stories, flagged by slates - instead of one long drawn out program - we could change the pace and subject matter of the program more quickly, and that as a result, viewers would stay more interested and retain more information in the end.

Editing Style: We prefer to use a modern snappy style of editing, rather than the more languorous plodding style in fashion years ago, and which audiences now find so dated. Today's viewers will not sit still if shots go on too long - or what's worse, repeat - and will switch channels or walk out. We never use shots twice, unless for effect. (We had great success and outstanding ratings with this editing style in our series "Outdoor Adventure Canada", where our 23 minute shows averaged 1,000 audio and video cuts, and contained more pictures and more cuts than are found in most one hour documentaries. The audience knows it's getting value for its viewing time. Wrote a typical viewer from British Columbia, who confessed to "not being a real TV watcher, but your show had me seated, and kept me seated.")

Picture Presentation:. Whenever possible pictures would be shot with movement, zooms, pans, or tilts, to help bring them to life - we have one camera tilt down for 3cm on a 2cm wide picture. Visual effects such as lights, exploding shells, etc. would be added to enhance action in still pictures. Antique colour prints would be used whenever possible to enrich the viewing experience. In conforming to our usual practice, pictures in the body of our program would never be used twice; the viewer would be presented with an image he/she had never seen before, every four to five seconds.

Victorian Ovals: The portrait oval was the universal way that Victorians and Edwardians preferred to frame their pictures. Almost all the pictures found in the archives are framed within ovals. Oval portraits are also commonly found on grave stones. In a very few cases we have used Victorian ovals because they fit the period and because they best express the emotion we are trying to convey.

Left, the picture of Lt. JW Osborne of Brantford, ON - as found in his original oval - is more poignant when shown matted over the trench in which he fought, died, and lies buried today, rather than showing the trench alone first, and then switching to his picture after. Showing the two together achieves an emotional punch that single pictures cannot achieve.

Likewise, to best convey the image of young Canadian bugler Douglas Williams leaping on to an anthill to blow the charge as bullets flew about him during the Battle of Paardeberg, we combine boy - as found in his original oval - and anthill together, instead of sequentially.

We feel that doing a superimposition - a fade of one image over/through the other is unsatisfactory because you cannot then see either picture clearly and so lose the emotional punch of seeing clearly the actual anthills on the battlefield and are denied as well a clear view of brave young Douglas Williams.

Supers: We believe in using "supers" - superimposing the names of important people whose faces appear in a program as a sort of polite introductory handshake when introducing our major characters to the viewer for the first time.

Today "supers" are common in television communication. But old-fashioned filmmakers, making long-form television programs often avoid using "supers" because, in the past, with film technology - where all today's documentarians got started - supers cost lots of money to make and so everyone avoided them like the plague, even though it was bad communication. Old habits die hard....

Supers are also avoided by many producers because television program distributors and salesmen tell them not to put them in, that having on-screen names in English - in fact writing supers of any kind - will hurt program sales possibilities in Spain, France, Scandinavia, Germany or Asia.

But viewers and critics alike complain about this practice because everyone likes to know/see the names/identity of major people that are being talked about. (Toronto Star TV critic Sid Adilman recently complained loudly about a history documentary of a singing group where the name of a key featured member was never identified with a super until one and a half hours into the program, in the tail credits.)

With today's digital video technology supering is fast and easy to do, and in fact, in every other area of modern television communications supering people's names is widely done. In fact it is the rule, not the exception. In British and American long-form documentaries supers are much more common than among Canadian long form programs.

Supering in a Multi-cultural Universe: Supering is an important tool of television communication especially because foreign sounding names are a growing problem for viewers/listeners in a multi-cultural world. If you just say a name on the sound track, 90% of the people will miss it 90% of the time. If the narrator refers to General "Botha" the name will be spoken in exactly .3 (point 3) seconds. Anyone not listening attentively during that .3 seconds will miss his name entirely and not be able to link the event or following story to a person, other than "You know, that Dutch guy", or "Oh I don't know. I didn't catch his name."

Important & Unusual Names: General Wauchope's name is one of many that cries for a super because it is so highly unusual sounding even to an Anglo ear.

In the era of People magazine, Biography channels, and the global village, with its ever widening circle of people with "funny sounding names" the television super is a wonderful tool for promoting good television and cross-cultural communication in long form documentaries.

Supering Separates Fact from Fiction: So much science and history documentary is now staged. Half the CBC History Series seems to have been shot of reenactors in some farmer's field and the other half in the CBC studios, probably because it's more economical to bring barrels, tables, chairs, candles, lamps, dressers, etc. to the studio, construct sets and shoot them there than to go to real historic locations. If there were any real historic locations used anywhere in the series no viewer ever knew it. No real historic site was ever identified; no viewer was ever informed.

Very Rare & Unusual Pictures. On Nov. 15, 1899 the most celebrated train wreck during the entire Anglo-Boer War took place on this spot. In fact this ultra rare photo shows the exact rocks at the exact spot which created the wreck that vaulted Winston Churchill into fame around the world. (See Page 11 for details.) If we didn't flag the rocks of this rare picture viewers would just say "Ho hum" instead of "Golly Gee. Is that ever neat!"

As a result we believe supering is increasingly called for to inform the viewer if historically unique pictures, locations, or events are shown, rather than have them dismissed by viewers; "No, no son, it's not the real one. It's probably fake just like everything else on TV."

Voice of: It is now common for voices from letters or speeches to be read as "voice-overs." The convention, often attributed to Ken Burns in the Civil War series - and followed by everyone else since - has always been to read the names of the "voices" at the end, the actor finishing his quotation with, "General William Bartholemew Smothers, Fifth Division, Grand Army of the Northern Republic".

This convention is unsatisfactory for a number of reasons. When the voice starts talking, you never know who you are listening to. Is it man or beast; fish or fowl? As the voice goes on - and if the quote is long the problem magnifies - you have no reference point at all; it's a voice out of the blue and it loses the punch of it's ownership or authorship.

Furthermore, you are supposed to suspend disbelief and accept that the voice you hear - from expensive actors - is the way the person would have spoken or sounded like at the time. It works fine until .....

But the effect is always ruined - no matter how good the reading - by the person labelling him/herself, in the same voice, after the quote. It spoils the mood.

The labelling also wastes enormous amount of screen time, during which you cannot advance the story, or pause for effect, etc. It is audio clutter. To get around these problems, some documentaries now no longer bother to identify the voice at all, just leave the reading hanging, unexplained, leaving the viewer completely in the dark as to whose voice that was. Reenactments are faked ... are voices and letters now also faked? It does save research time and costs ....

Voice of: Willie Griesbach. Willie was a Western Canadian who joined the Canadian Mounted Rifles and wrote a book on his Anglo-Boer War experiences called "I Remember." He is a major character in our program. In later life he became mayor of Edmonton and a Major-General in the Canadian Army.

We simply apply the same technique to "voice-overs". Television audiences, who are "super-educated" can take in at a glance the identity of the speaker and know right away who is talking and who he/she is. No more guessing and waiting till the quote ends. No more odd voice cutting off an emotional quote with a coldly administrative, "By the way, I'm General Blythely Smythe III, the Commandant of the Free State Army speaking". In a one hour show this frees up several minutes worth of audio clutter that can now be used to advance the story or add another anecdote or two. We believe the "Voice of:" convention enormously improves the "voices from the past" form of television communication on a number of levels.

Voices of the Enemy: Most television history programs have featured the voices of the countrymen of the filmmaker making a POV heritage documentary. Only recently has the odd German and Japanese voice been added into documentaries that deal with World Wars I and II from the Allied side. Mostly these "voices of the enemy" are still few and far between. Because we preferred to show the human side - rather than the "Allied" or "Canadian" side - of the war, we have included an unprecedented number of "voices of the enemy" in our program.