STANDUP STRATEGIES

Love them or hate them, TV reporters have to do standups. Maybe not every day for every story, but often enough to make them seem a chore. There actually are plenty of good reasons for doing standups, some as old as television news itself. The trouble is, many standups today look no different than they did half a century ago: the reporter gets in front of the camera and talks.

That used to be enough. “In the beginning of network TV news, the standup close was mainly a device to establish that, by golly, a correspondent had been on the scene of the news event just reported,” wrote the late Jim Snyder, who ran TV newsrooms in Washington and Detroit. A standup not only can help to establish credibility, it’s a way for reporters to build a relationship with viewers, giving them a face to put with the voice. But the challenge for reporters and photographers today is to produce standups that add more to a story than “presence.”

Too many standups are an afterthought, thrown together at the end of a shoot just to get something in the can. A standup should be an essential part of your narrative, adding new information and moving the story forward. A little forethought and some critical questions can make all the difference:

• Why would we want to include a standup in this story?
• What information would we convey in a standup?
• Do we have something to show or demonstrate in this standup?
• Where and when might we do this standup?
• How will the standup fit into the finished story?

Standups can be an effective way of explaining complicated issues or concepts, especially if you can find a simple analogy to illustrate the point. How does a retention pond work? Kind of like a coffee filter. How do the candidates’ budget plans differ? Like servings of pie at the local diner—larger slices of some flavors and smaller slices of others. Show-and-tell standups aren’t for every story, every day, but used judiciously, they can help viewers make sense of difficult subjects.

Another way of adding visual interest to a longer standup is to shoot it in multiple takes. This allows you to walk your viewer through a complex process by illustrating individual steps in a visual sequence. Create a simple storyboard in advance to ensure that you’ll have everything you need for editing purposes.

Before you shoot any standup you need a clear idea of your story structure—not a complete script but a mental outline. Sometimes, it’s helpful to shoot more than one version in case that structure changes. But if you wind up with a standup that really doesn’t fit, resist the temptation to use it anyway. Then promise yourself that tomorrow, you’ll plan and execute a standup that really works.