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By Way of Introduction
I've always
liked to write. When I left the Navy, I had two years of college left to do and
I completed them with an honors degree in creative writing. I tried
writing fiction with no success, but found I had a talent for nonfiction.
Films and Videos
Then I got
interested in film, studied documentary filmmaking with the late Sol Worth at
the Annenberg School of Communications at Penn, and spent the next several
years directing and editing nonfiction films and videos. About the only writing I was doing in those
years was scripting my own projects.
This
eventually led to my being asked to write scripts for other producers. But by this time I came to scriptwriting more
from the point of view of a film editor and director than from that of a writer. In fact, during that time I wrote an article
about documentary scriptwriting for Writers'
Digest that I called "Writing
Without Words." These days I focus
exclusively on writing, but I start each script with the question, "What
can we show?" not, "What do we say?" I think the best scripts help the viewer
experience the storyline through a well-organized presentation of visual
evidence. Words count; but on the screen,
strong, credible images count even more.
I love what
I do. I enjoy going out and researching
a problem that may be brand new to me until I know enough to survive a pop quiz
on the subject - and enough to write a fully visualized script about it. For the documentary, Beyond Division:
Reuniting the Republic of Cyprus, I spent two weeks on that divided
island, viewing scenes such as the airport at the capital city of Nicosia,
bombed out and abandoned for almost thirty years.
To write a script to help the FBI recruit Native Americans, I went to
the annual meeting of the National Congress of American Indians in St. Paul,
interviewed tribal elders and young Native Americans, and attended a
pow-wow. For a script about the MGM
Grand Adventures theme park, I rode all the rides - including the one that got
us soaking wet. That kind of script
research translates into powerful images on the screen.
Articles and Books
The
research for a film script is much like the research for a magazine article;
the only difference being that for a script you have to come up with filmable
images in addition to the facts and storyline. I’ve written dozens of articles, also serving
as Hawaii stringer for The Hollywood Reporter
and editor of Hawaii High Tech Journal, a business publication about new
technology for a nontechnical audience.
Along the
way, I have returned from time to time to my first love, books. Since I was writing both magazine articles
and scripts for videos, I realized that, on average, I made about five times as
much money for researching and writing a ten-to-fifteen-minute script as I
earned for a magazine article, although the time and effort were very
similar. From that came my first book, Video Scriptwriting, in which I tried to
help print writers make the transition to film and video.
Then my
next book evolved out of a scriptwriting assignment. A production company I often worked with - which
specialized in commercials and short videos for business clients - had filmed
hours and hours of interviews and B-roll with a group of veterans of the Battle
of Midway who had returned to the atoll for the fiftieth anniversary of the
battle. The producer asked me to write a script
that would meld their original footage with stock historical footage to tell
the story of the battle through the eyes of these Defenders of Midway. As I
went through the footage, I realized that, good as the director and camera
operator were at making commercials, they hadn’t a clue about how to approach
planning and filming a documentary. While
I was working on the script, I also began outlining a proposal for a book that
became the original edition of Making
Documentary Films and Reality Videos: A Practical Guide to Planning, Filming,
and Editing Documentaries of Real Events.
I’m
delighted to say this book has become one of the three or four standard texts
in university courses in documentary filmmaking.
It was
followed by a book I had high hopes for, Making Videos for Money. Unfortunately, the publisher's marketing strategy
was to hide the book from sight and make people beg for it. Those who have read it, have found it very
useful. But their numbers are few.
I'm now now working on a new version with the working title of Creating Client Videos. This is planned as a series of three books, with the first book, on corporate videos and information videos, to be published in mid-2009. When I was unable to reach agreement on a contract with a well-established publisher, I decided to self-publish it as an e-book and a print-on-demand paper book. And if that goes well, I may re-release Video Scriptwriting in the same way.
Look Around
On this website
you'll find many examples of the work I've done and the sorts of things I'm
interested in. I'd be glad to have your
comments, either at the Comments and Questions Message Board or by sending me
an e-mail.
All the
best. . .
Barry Hampe
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