The Sound of TV

For the last three weeks, my Friday nights have been spent watching the last thing I worked on before lockdown: Sound of TV with Neil Brand on BBC Four. It’s an exquisite journey through the familiar soundtrack to our lives, characterised by the music that underscores society’s primary form of entertainment. It was a privilege to work on, too: I was part of a team of exceptionally talented producers, all of us feeling lucky to be working with the nicest presenter in television. This production also marked my first brush with scriptwriting – I was tasked with researching Episode Two, and took the opportunity to write a rough outline of a script for it, which became less and less rough as the rushes came back and I was able to play with the beginnings of an edit script. After my contract ended, curatorship was handed over to a brilliant edit producer, Lucy, but when it came to the screening I was delighted to see that some of my script did make it through the rigorous editing process! It was a tricky episode to structure – jingles, channel idents and advertisements were all bundled into the episode together – but the spinal column of the episode followed the logical and chronological structure that I had planned out in my version of the script. I feel now that I can move forward with renewed confidence to the next step in my career.

Story Arcs

As I’ve gained more experience in both development and production, I’ve learned more and more about how to structure a story, and what makes a good story.

I’ve written in an earlier blog post about story structure, but in this post I want to talk specifically about story arc. This is where you go on a journey during the story, and at the end you’re in a different place to when you began. Some sort of progress needs to have been made during the story, whether that’s moving forward in time, or in terms of an experiment, or just a change for the character.

For example, we could be following the story of a farmer who is trying out a new species of apple tree in his orchard. We find out why he’s trying out this kind of tree, what difference he hopes it will make in his orchard, and what’s so special about the apples it produces. Then there’s a twist: perhaps the tree doesn’t take well to the soil, or the neighbouring farmers disapprove of the new crop, or supermarkets won’t buy it. And finally, the farmer makes some changes to the fertiliser or finds a different supplier to take his new breed of apples, and the story is resolved. The orchard has changed, the farmer has changed, the apples have changed.

This is an example of what I like to call a ‘perfect cadence’ story. Any other readers who did their Grade 5 Music Theory test will (hopefully!) remember that a perfect cadence as a series of chords which resolves the musical line at the end of a phrase. But not all stories have to end in resolution. An ‘imperfect cadence’ story might run as follows:

A farmer is trying a new type of apple tree in his orchard. We find out why he’s trying out this kind of tree, what difference he hopes it will make in his orchard, and what’s so special about the apples it produces. But the tree doesn’t take well to the soil, and in the first season he gets barely any apples – none of them are saleable. He seeks advice from an apple expert, and tries a series of experiments to see if he can get this new apple tree to work in his orchard. The apple expert tells us what these experiments should show, and how the farmer might use the results of the experiments to improve his apple growing capabilities. We leave the farmer to his experiments, having learned about the apples, but without the resolution of whether or not he has been successful.

An imperfect cadence story might not be fully resolved at the end, but it should leave the viewer with some hope for the future. There is still a story arc, because there has been a change: at the start of the story, the farmer was hoping to grow a new kind of apple tree. At the end of the story, the farmer is growing the apple tree, but still has some work to do in order to make it commercially viable.

So if you’re trying to find stories with good story arcs, or trying to shape an existing story, remember to look for a change between the beginning and the end of the story, but don’t get stuck on trying to engineer an appropriate resolution.