The Country Calendar guide to storytelling

A week or so ago Frank Torley, the executive producer of Country Calendar, came to Hamilton to speak at Wintec’s Media Bites function.

Here’s what he had to say on why the programme’s so successful and how the team go about telling stories:

“I don’t know… I’d like to believe that the New Zealand public recognises quality.

“The beginning of that process is research. If anybody says ‘Why is Country Calendar successful?’ — research, research, research. Keep doing it, find the story. What is the story, what are the people like, what else can we do?

“Having diagnosed, if you like, this is a good story, then we are the spoilt brats I suppose in so far as they do give us the budget to enable us to put the time and effort into making the programme.

“From the time of ‘here’s a story idea’ to ‘let’s go and shoot it’, may take a period of two or three weeks while we really look at it and make sure it all works.

“We then don’t leave it to chance, we do have it mapped out. We write up those research notes so the producer can get a decent handle on the story and not just airy fairy ‘oh, yeah, I reckon it’ll work’. It’s got to work, and it’s got to be seen to work.

“And then comes a treatment so that you’ve got an outline. Planning, if you like. PPPPP as our production manager calls it. Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance.

“And then we are given the opportunity to spend the time and …we get the wonderful co-operation of getting top cameramen and sound recordists.”

I’ll try to pull out more from his talk a little later. It was really good.