Kalevi Uusivori of YLE (© IAAF)
The Journalistic Approach
Covering athletics is difficult. Competition rules and event formats have led to complicated timetables. For the broadcaster, these schedules often lead to built-in clashes between events, which may reach their peak moments simultaneously. Therefore urgent changes should be made in the formatting of athletics in order to enhance and better promote this great sport.
In many ways, the coverage of major athletics events is declining. Besides poorly-composed timetables, directors and producers with misguided approaches to the sport have become a problem. Viewers are becoming frustrated, and they deserve better. This is an effort to explain how to achieve that.
We believe that all of the best camera positions for covering athletics have been discovered. Recognising this, the driving force for any broadcaster should be how the average viewer views the competition, rather than rushing to locate cameras in innovative ways. Producers and directors must understand the way in which viewers watch television: how they think, feel and want to be entertained.
Applied to athletics, the journalistic approach means outlining this reality in a way that captures the viewer’s interest. The journalistic approach consists of thorough homework by the director and proper storytelling: the two keys to better coverage.
Homework
By homework we mean not only getting acquainted with the venue, the organizers and the tools of television production, but also exploring the sport itself. The director’s preparation should include in-depth research into the key players: the athletes.
Beyond the athletes’ names, it is crucial to identify them and their potential. The director must know not only the favourites and the defending champions, but also those athletes with their last shot at a win, recovering from an injury or showing exceptional nerve at a major event.
All of this forms the most important part of production planning, because it hints at, or even reveals, how the reality will unfold during the competition. Only then do the start lists begin to make sense. Only then there is solid ground to draft the potential story and decide how to tell it with cameras and mikes.
Storytelling
The viewer expects and demands to be entertained. To do this, we must touch his or her feelings. We must realise that only when a viewer chooses an athlete as a favourite, and identifies with him or her, do the athlete’s rivals become a threat.
In his book Poetics, Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) explained the fundamentals of storytelling. In order to capture the viewer’s emotions, he said, a story should contain three parts: the beginning, the middle and the end. This formula perfectly suits athletics.
In athletics, the beginning includes the heats of track events and the qualifications for field events. Here the favourites must be highlighted so that the viewer can recognise them. This is achieved at the cost of other athletes, who appear less in the pictures. This is most important, because, as Aristotle puts it, if we do not know the player, what may happen to him later makes no difference.
In the first part of the story, the ingredients are planted in order to evoke expectations. The viewer enjoys the feelings of excitement and suspense that are connected with this anticipation.
The middle part includes the semi-finals and finals of track events and the finals of field events. These are the highlights of the event: the battle for medals. The competition should be filmed in an intelligible way, without missing any essential incidents. A viewer anywhere in the world must comprehend both the competition itself and the story line. This will be explained later on. The middle part ends with a climax: as the final of each event concludes, everything becomes clear.
The third section, the end, covers the euphoria of victory and the disappointment of defeat. This part also includes a motivated step back to analyse the race or field event final.
Turning points of a single event
This implies that all events should be covered as a single competition, starting with qualification and going through to the final.
As mentioned above, the favourites need more on-screen time than the average athlete during qualification sessions of the throwing events and horizontal jumps. Generally, the top athletes meet the qualification standard on their first attempt and then leave the range of cameras.
On the other hand the favourites may not meet the qualification standard in the first round. Thus they may create the journalistically interesting situation of a favourite in trouble during the third round.
The heats of track events and the qualifications for the vertical jumps offer the director more room to manoeuvre in regard to the top athletes. But in throwing events and horizontal jumps the third round (or, in the vertical jumps, the height set as the qualification standard) is the first point of elimination and good material for storytelling.
The next elimination points come in the semi-finals of track events or the third round of the throwing and horizontal jumps finals. The elimination points of athletic events can be considered turning points where the story heats up.
During the last rounds of a field or track event final, the key players eventually deserve equal treatment, as these athletes are vying for medals.
The viewer’s position
In watching sporting events, particularly athletics, the viewer looks into the depth of the picture. He or she picks out objects of interest from this depth, normally the key athletes of the event. The viewer is reluctant to lose visual contact with his or her favourite. The viewer also participates in the coverage, in effect using the mind as a camera. There is pleasure in mentally zooming, panning and tilting in the view of a camera shot.
The producer or director should understand this when cutting between cameras. Hectic cutting without any clear motivation annoys the viewer, as visual contact with a favourite competitor may be lost and has to be re-established. Unnecessary slow-motion replays have the same effect.
A director who cuts to a medium shot for three seconds in a sprint final indicates a lack of skill. In this case the viewer loses visual contact with his or her favourite for six seconds, as it takes an additional three seconds to find and re-identify the competitor. In a sprint event this means lost visual contact for over 50 meters.
Furthermore, the filming plan should allocate the viewer the best seats in the stands. These angles should be maintained through the event. The cutting must answer three questions for the viewer. First: where are we or which event? Second: which athlete? Third: how is this athlete doing in relation to his or her rivals?
Producers and directors pursuing world-class coverage of major athletic events should understand the importance of the journalistic approach. This approach leads to good storytelling, as the reality of the competition becomes entertaining. The target should always be the viewer’s mind