On location storytelling

Respect the story

Every story has a beginning, a middle and an end. Every story also has a bunch of other stuff: character, setting, feeling and tone. Often the event, or circumstances dictate the tone. Get the tone right, and your viewer, listener or reader won’t notice. Get it wrong, and your audience won’t remember your story, and they’ll just remember you as the person who stuffed it up.

My UBER driver asked me if I had been to Africa.

‘Yes’, I said. ‘I was in Dar es Salaam for a week a few years ago’.

‘I am from Ethiopia’, he said. ‘Tanzania is a beautiful country’.

‘It is’, I agreed. I told him about a walk I took through the streets of the city, and about the grilled corn I ate standing on the footpath near the coast.

‘Oh, I miss that corn’, he said as he smiled and remembered.

I told him the story about the Australian Defence Forces Entertainment trip I covered with Mick Molloy, John Schumann and Hugh McDonald. We waited in Dar es Salaam for days for the HMAS Darwin to arrive. The ship had been delayed because it was doing its job: patrolling the Indian Ocean for drugs. That week they had been incredibly effective, recovering the largest amount of drugs in the operation’s history. You can read about the bust here.

A year later, I had the privilege to be at ANZAC Cove in Turkey for the Dawn Service for the ANZAC Centenary. The show I produce, Triple M’s Hot Breakfast, received one of only three invitations from the Federal Government to attend and cover the Dawn Service.

We checked in to ANZAC Cove and set-up our studio in a wooden purpose built press box at the back of the public area. By the time the ceremony began, Will Todd (our engineer) and I had been in position for nearly 24 hours.

This is nothing special. I’m not asking for a pat on the back. I’m sharing this because I want to talk about the importance of tone. When you tell a story, you must be conscious of the respect a story deserves. The Centenary of ANZAC would only ever happen one time. The tone and effort had to be equal to the day. We would have waited a week if that’s what it required to get it right.

The event sets the tone

As part of our coverage that day, we interviewed many people: soldiers, widows, family members, politicians. Their stories deserved a careful rendering.

This year, I didn’t travel as far for ANZAC Day stories, but the stories I heard deserved the same approach. I attended a Soldier On fundraiser in Sydney. Mick Molloy is a Soldier On ambassador. We recorded half-a-dozen interviews with patrons, a former Prime Minister and several men who had been injured in war zones.

The stories they told are personal, thoughtful and real. The content we produced had to be the same. You can listen to Mick’s ANZAC Day Special here.

Thanks for reading, thanks for sharing your stories, and if you listened to Mick’s special, thanks for listening.

And if you’re a story teller, a writer, a producer, a photographer, remember this: it’s easy to think it’s just a story, but the best stories are the stories that provide an authentic insight into another person’s life.