InfoD-Cafe: The cinematographic language of instructions

[Conrad Taylor]

Apologies for coming late to this discussion; and, of course,
I shall contribute little of any academic value, as is my way...
  ;-)

I have made a number of videos which could not be described
as "instructional" -- if by that you mean that you desire people
to repeat what has been shown -- but "explanatory", which means
that they are supposed to explain and illustrate complex processes.
The former is not a perfect subset of the latter, but there must
be quite an overlap; and there is some overlap of technique, too.

The cinematographic language brings to the art of explanation
and instruction two useful distortions of reality:

   (a)  the ability to rapidly shift from one Point Of View
        (hereinafter POV) to another;

   (b)  the ability to distort and in particular to elide
        passages of time.

That is not the entire toolkit, but they are the two methods that
are used most routinely.

To illustrate this: quite a few years ago I made a video about
"How a magazine gets printed", which I have subsequently used
in training events.  The reason for making this was that many
people responsible for specifying and ordering print for their
companies had never seen the processes in action.  Several
times, I arranged for the course participants to have a
guided tour of a medium-sized print-plant, but this was
time-consuming, too dependent on the goodwill of printers,
and didn't display a wide enough range of processes (e.g.
could not show both web-fed and sheet-fed presses in action).

Imagine explaining (cinematographically, with narration)
the operation of a Heidelberg CPC Speedmaster sheet-fed
press.  We want to show the whole press in wide view.
We narrate that it is fed with sheets of paper (POV-cut
to paper feed mechanism, side-view... we see the sheets
going down the registration slide one by one).  Suction
feet and compressed air are used to make sure only one
sheet at a time is fed (POV-cut to rear view, where the
operation of the suction foot array is most obvious).
The press has four printing-heads, one for each colour
(POV-cut to wide view, showing first two heads, angled
view) and the sheet of paper passes through each in
turn (not a POV-cut, but a pan with slowly opening zoom
to follow the course the sheet takes).  Having received
impressions from all four printing units, the sheet is
delivered with a full colour image (POV-cut to the
delivery end of the press, medium shot, and slowly
zoom in to printed sheets falling one on top of each
other).

Five different points of view, with instant transitions
between them, ranging from wide shots to shots that show
so much detail in close-up (thanks to telephoto lenses)
that one might be in mortal danger trying to replicate
them with the naked eye.  All steady-shot on tripod,
all perfectly focused, and the trickery is perfectly
accepted by the audience which has become used to the
convention.

Note that in the scenario described above, we can exploit
the mass-production, repeated nature of the print process.
Each part of the press is doing exactly the same repeated
action at intervals slightly less than a second.  During
a run of the press, we have plenty of time to move the
single camera to each required POV and film a segment.
Edit the segments together guided by the audio, so
the rhythm of the press doesn't make a jump, and you
have what you want.  Filming the take-off of an Ariane
rocket from Kourou from several different POVs could not
be done with a single camera.

As for the manipulation of time, let's go to an earlier
part of the print-process: the platemaking.  Remember that
this movie was made prior to direct-image platemaking.
So we show the imagesetter, and we describe how this
machine is using a laser beam to image our pages as
film positives.  Switch to the film-processor unit,
and the film is emerging with the page image visible
on it.  Switch to the film-imposition light table,
where the films are being attached to carrier foils.
Switch to several POV-shots of the printing-down
frame, where the foils are laid onto plates and
exposed to UV light.  Switch to the rear end of
the plate processor, where the plates emerge with
imposed page images on them.  Those, as it happens,
are all POV-cuts; but they are also understood to be
a contraction of elapsed time, so that in 90 seconds
we can explain a process that in truth takes 45 minutes.

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

My implementation of these two techniques depended in the
example above on videotape and editing to achieve both
POV-shifts and time-shifts.  Where do the roots of these
techniques lie, culturally?  Probably in story-telling,
and they are well established in the form of the novel.
The stage-play, of course, is another animal...

Let's take a jump back to instructional television for
children, and to the early 1960s, a few years after the
BBC Children's Television programme "Blue Peter" started
transmission (it is the longest-running children's TV
show in the world, and will be 50 years old in October).

 From quite early on, the shows featured craft demonstrations
in which we children (there were no "kids" in Britain at
that time, other than in herds of goats) were encouraged
and shown how to make toys and gifts and decorative or
practical objects out of disused cereals packets and toilet-
rolls, glue, sticky tape and stick-backed plastic (terms
invented by the programme makers so as not to use such
trade names as "Sellotape" and "Fablon") ... and of course
serious glues that are no longer sold to children due to
the novel mind-altering uses to which such substances are
now put.

These programmes went out live (they still usually do),
though they usually included one segment that had been
filmed and edited and were transmitted through a telecine
machine.  There was very little use in the BBC at that
time of the new-fangled Quadruplex 2" video recording
system in preparing programmes; though Blue Peter was
one of the few programmes to have been consistently
archived from 1964 (and on video from 1970).

Craft demonstrations also required, as in my examples above,
shifts of POV, particularly from shots showing the presenter
in wider shot to extreme close-ups showing beads of glue
being applied to fuzzy-felt, etc.  Given the real-time
nature of the show, this was achieved by multiple cameras
well choreographed, and a switcher desk.

Time shifts, however, were impossible with this technology,
hence the invention by one of Blue Peter's two first presenters,
Chistopher Trace, of the phrase "Here's one I made earlier" --
as a version was produced in which the glue had set, paint
had dried, etc.

I've used Blue Peter as an exemplar, but anyone who wanted
to make a historical study of the evolution if instructional
methods on TV might find the archives of the BBC a treasury.
Sad, then, that in the name of recycling and cost-cutting,
all the 1970s and early 1980s master videotopes of "Tomorrow's
World" were erased...

There must also be military training films as another kind
of resource.  And cookery programmes.  Maybe even military
cooking programmes.

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

A supplementary technique which I have also had to use in
cinematographic explanation is, of course, diagrams and the
animation thereof.  Generally this is when a diagram can
reveal processes that would be hidden to a camera or even
a human observer, or show the action of what could never be
visible (such as the passage of data through in information
circuit, or the action of gravity or radiation) -- or, of
course, where the diagram simplifies what is complicated
to see in reality.  But that would take the discussion
into realms which I do not have time to address just now.

Hope some of these ramblings help!

Conrad

--