engaging stories... ...told economically

What now seems depressingly far in the past I trained at the BBC in the art or sullen craft of editing film. It was great, and after a career, I left to pursue outdoor activities. I became a race yacht navigator and delivery skipper, until my fortune was inevitably reduced to subsistence.

Decca and the newly available GPS were all the rage. In navigational terms they amount to credulity to three decimal places. It was all about believing the numbers. The higher the technology I was given to use, the more I worried about losing touch with the basics. So I kept the sextant going and read lots about aboriginal navigation and practised whatever I could.

I am sure that staying grounded in the fundamentals of navigation are what gave me 'position sense' and the good intuitions which kept us safe. It is the same, for me at least, with making films. Whilst it is true that new technologies and workflows are liberating, there are issues too. I find it increasingly rare to meet people who can 'build it in their heads' as well as the cameramen and editors with whom I worked back in the 70s and 80s. Some things are getting lost. And nobody is teaching the incomers.

All films of any consequence have, at their foundation, a well structured and engagingly told story. And stories start in your head. So long as we are beguiled by ever higher performance toys to the detriment of considering the underlying story we will produce the ephemeral and unsubstantial bling for which TV is earning its demise.

Of course technical quality is important. But the thing that makes me happy about the future is that while so many are dashing out and shooting ever prettier but meaningless pictures and exquisitely cutting them to whatever passes for music, I am with those who concentrate on the underlying story rather than a victory of style over substance.

Interestingly enough, technology has a timely solution. VeriCorder have produced an app for the iPhone which, along with a bit of improving hardware (Owle Bubo), make a raw but powerful storytelling system. There is very little production value, so if the story doesn't work then you don't get away with it. But you can shoot, edit and upload short but complete stories in a quarter of an hour. This is exciting, because in the end it is the emotionally and rationally compelling stories that audiences really crave. And here is a way of producing them with minimal resources.

My sackcloth and ashes world is not the complete answer, but for me it lowers the water level on the Emperor's sartorial realities.

A very long time ago we humans sat around our campfires. When it got dark there wasn't a lot to do beyond going to bed, and that was not the relaxing thing it usually is today. There was no writing so there was nothing to read, there was no radio so nothing to listen to and no TV so there was little to deaden the mind after a long day's subsistence living. And back then, a rock concert was a very different sort of a thing from today.

We complained about the boredom. We complained about the dark. We complained about the never ending work just to hang on to what Hobbes called: our mean, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short lives. We shared the joy and misery of our existence and then forgot about it. But in the flickering embers of deep pre-history something extraordinary began to happen.

Any communication is an attempt to impact the minds of others. "Duck!" is a good and well-intentioned example. "Stick 'em up!" is often more self serving on behalf of the utterer. "You're under arrest!" is the precursor to the bitter consequences of some badly thought out entrepreneurial whimsy.

Each utterance is an argument for a course of behaviour. My first example must be immediately compelling to be of any use. Otherwise, if the response is not what we desire then further weight can be given to the argument: "I'll blow your head off!" and maybe "We have you surrounded!"

All of this works well in the moment. But if you want to capture a sophisticated argument and persuade audiences long beyond the reach of your years, then you need more than these simple utterances. Humans make decisions about things emotionally and then rationalise them. So, the argument needs to be compelling in both emotional and logical ways. And further, since this is likely to be a fairly long argument, it will need to be interesting or it will fall on places where ears used to be.

The extraordinary thing I mentioned earlier, fanned from the flames of confusion, was story. Stories were, initially, easily remembered and probably rhyming pieces of knowledge. They had the distinction of preserving culture, philosophy, religion, science, maps and probably did some entertaining too. In this way we began to realise that there was increasing evidence that we don't learn from history.

Early stories were probably much like the rather beautiful creation stories that still survive in aboriginal cultures. They remained part of a verbal tradition until more reliably preserved by the invention of writing. Gutenberg and his press further improved the record and town criers gave way to journalists who are slowly giving way to game show panels.

I think that it's worth considering the way story works within different media. Then we won't make the mistake of thinking that someone made a film of a book.  We'll realise that actually what happened is that someone made a film of a story, about which somebody once wrote a book. It is the story which forms the foundation and not the medium of publication.