Basic TV Director Application

Author: Shao Changbo
Editor-in-Chief: Ke Yang
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2000-01-01
Features: This book, Fundamentals of Television Directing, is the teaching material I used while teaching the "Fundamentals of Directing" course in television over the past few years. To be honest, writing such a book is already a difficult task. It requires a solid foundation in scriptwriting, editing, and especially directing theory, as well as extensive experience in creative practice. Each teacher has their own teaching methods for the "Fundamentals of Directing" course, and everyone has a different focus when delivering the lectures. There are no existing, well-formed reference books for this course, so both the teaching of this course and the writing of this book have a certain level of difficulty. In the nearly two years, while completing my heavy teaching tasks, I worked at the computer almost every night until 12 o'clock, without interruption even during holidays, constantly revising and enriching this teaching material. However, due to my limited theoretical knowledge and limited expertise, I am not entirely satisfied with the current draft, let alone my peers in the television industry. Television, as a mass and public communication medium, produces a vast number of new programs every day. Once a new program is released, old programs, whether as examples or in form, appear outdated. Beyond classics, the study of program content and form should also be continuously enriched, so this book is constantly revised. As a teacher, I always want to teach students the newest things. This may be another reason why this book was difficult to produce. More importantly, for television directors, directing theater and film is a relatively new field. Director theory books from other fields can only serve as general references, but for the thinking and system of television directors, further exploration is needed. These difficulties have increased the challenge of writing this book, but they have also given it a freshness. Regarding the structure of this book, I wanted to break away from the traditional, specialized writing style of various television programs. Instead of focusing on the directing work and characteristics of a single television art style, I aimed to find commonalities. Because "director" is a broad concept: a television director is different from a theater director, and different from a film director. Theater and film directors are primarily script and feature film directors; television directors include directors of television dramas, television arts programs, and even some column programs and documentary editors and directors who call themselves "directors." It can be said that, except for television news programs like news bulletins, anyone involved in television production is considered a director. Although some of them interact with actors in their work, others may not, but they are all involved in directing work. Therefore, writing a book about television directing naturally cannot exclude these contents. The directing work of television dramas, television arts programs, and narrative documentaries should all be covered. So, I tried to write this book based on the common thinking and creative processes of these directors. In each chapter, I discuss both television dramas and television arts programs, with a focus on variety show programs, and also touch on documentaries to some extent. I aim to clearly explain the basic tasks and requirements of every aspect of a director's work from the broad concept of television directing, extracting commonalities to help students get involved in any directing role. At the same time, in the early chapters, I also cover news and interviews, introducing the concept of news into the creative process of television art programs. Writing in this way may involve a risk, as the broad scope means it's impossible to delve deeply into any single issue or theory. However, it at least provides a certain understanding of the various directing roles covered in this book and explains how to approach them. Therefore, I have positioned this book as a Fundamentals of Application. Theoretically, it is sufficient for use; conceptually, it seeks commonalities; and operationally, it emphasizes processes and specific steps. I believe that with this theoretical foundation and applied skills, combined with the specific teaching of other professional courses, students will be able to handle any program with ease. This aligns more closely with the objective requirements of versatile talent needed by television stations.
Excerpt:
Chapter What is Television?
What is television? This question seems a bit strange, and I've seen it raised before. In 1951, Andre Bazin and others founded a famous magazine called Cahiers du Cinéma. Bazin published a series of articles on film theory in it, which were later collected into a book titled What Is Cinema? This book explores theories and practices related to the nature of cinema, the evolution of cinematic language, and the works of some contemporary renowned directors. Here, we borrow this approach to explore the characteristics of television. As a book on television directing, it is essential to first understand the attributes of television as a mass media.
Section Mass Media
What is television? Let's first explore its origins. As early as the 1980s, Paul Nipkow, a student at Berlin University in Germany, while studying physics, came up with the idea of dividing images into individual points of light based on the principle of pinhole imaging, then transmitting the images of people or scenes to distant locations. Subsequently, he designed an instrument called a "television telescope." On January 6, 1884, he applied for a patent with the Berlin Royal Patent Office. The patent application read: "This invention enables an object at location A to be seen at any location B." A year later, on January 15, 1885, the patent was approved. From then on, the term "television" was born. In the 1920s and 1930s, Americans combined the Greek word tele—meaning "far"—with the Latin word visus—meaning "sight"—to create a new English word: televition, meaning "seeing distant pictures." Nipkow's invention, after a series of developments by scientists in Europe and America, solved the problem of photoelectric conversion and completed a series of technical challenges, including the camera tube, television sets, and long-distance transmission, bringing television into the field of communication and becoming a powerful medium that influenced people's lifestyles in the 20th century.