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Beginnings and Endings by Ian Simpson Why is it that for family members and friends, the act of watching your home movies is up there with slide shows as the worst form of torture you can inflict on them? Are we all that bad at our hobby? Are all our videos that boring and irrelevant?

If we disregard all those unedited, straight from the camera, random collection of shots; those sickening moving scenes; the interminable panning of scenery and people; if we disregard these all too common attempts at movie making and only consider those videos where a conscious attempt has been made to tell a story; then why do we still fail to enthuse? Why is it that our videos continually fail to get a place in our Club competitions?

The answer to this question is multifaceted; there are the technical aspects, the production standards followed and the creative aspects. As far as production standards go, well that comes from continually viewing and analysing other peoples' videos, from watching TV shows, from going to the cinema and also for some, like me, it was one of the reasons I joined a video club. During all this viewing of other peoples' works, we find that some videos will grab us and others won't. Think about it. Why did I like that video but couldn't be bothered with another? If you analyse these videos I'm sure you will find that the "liked" video engaged your attention right from the start, held your interest and gave you a satisfactory ending. But you say, we all know a good story has a beginning, a middle and an end.

Further we know that movies these days can have this order all mixed up, or as the famous French film director, Jean-Luc Godard, once reported of a conversation he had with another film maker:

"Movies should have a beginning, a middle and an end," harrumphed French Film maker Georges Franju …
"Certainly" replied Jean-Luc Godard, "But not necessarily in that order."

The human need to tell stories, whether it be a humorous one at the pub or a great literary classic, has been discussed by everyone from philosophers to literary critics through out the ages. Also there is a human need to tell stories that have a structure; a beginning, a middle and an end. One explanation of this need for a structured story is because human life has a defined beginning and end. As a consequence humans require everything else they deal with in their lives to also follow this structure.

An alternate explanation, however, is that everything is just a progression of events and that an individual during their lives will interact and influence only a very small set of these events. The vast majority of events exist as a matrix that either does not or only weakly influences an individual's life. In this view, time is only a mental concept of humans and so beginnings, middles and ends have a meaning only in relation to a set of interconnecting events, events which can influence other events around them in direct and indirect ways.

Story Telling Models

As the reader you may say, "all of this philosophical discussion may be well and good but what has it to do with videography?"

Here the answer lies in which of the above two explanations you are more comfortable with when telling your story in your video. If you like the former explanation then your video will follow the conventional linear approach; where a beginning excites the viewer by introducing characters, location and conflict; a middle then develops the characters and the conflict and the ending then resolves some or all of the conflict. Diagrammatic examples of this structure are:

In the first diagram the beginning foreshadows an event which when resolved leads naturally to an end. This is the simple linear story telling common in jokes, fairy stories, and most of our family events and holidays videos. For example: On Christmas Eve the children put out their stockings and head for bed hoping that Santa does not forget them. In the morning they rush to the tree to see if Santa has been. The conclusion is the tree and floor disappearing in fragments of frantically ripped open presents.

The second linear story telling example deals with more than one event linking the beginning and the end. An example of this model could be a holiday video encompassing many different places visited or activities undertaken. These stills from Brian Deakin's Diary of a Travel Video - see here.

If life is not viewed as a time sequence but rather as a collection of events, then the resulting video could be presented as a collection of related events, that is more in the mould of Jean-Luc Godard's comment, where the structure may be more circular and interpretation of the video depends more on the understanding of the inter-connecting events than where is the beginning or the end of the story. A diagrammatic representation of the circular structure is shown on the right. Examples of that are where the end scene is similar to the first scene. For Example: one movie began with an accident on a bridge and ended with an accident on a bridge. In the movie Sliding Doors the heroine near the beginning of the film drops her earring in the lift and the film ends with the very same act.

What are Effective Beginnings and Endings?

As our videos are often short; 6 to 10 minutes in duration, our beginning and end scenes have to be handled with more efficiency and speed than in commercial cinema.

For example, our beginning has to take less than one minute, during which we must introduce the theme or character and the dramatic situation. No one can tell you how to make an eye catching beginning, only your own creativity.

Better is the End of a Thing than the Beginning thereof

As far as an effective ending goes, this can be a bit easier to achieve.

Of these two story formats, the former, with an ending that successfully resolves the conflict, will leave the audience satisfied and content. If the ending is a fit with both the beginning and the middle, the audience will accept an unexpected ending and even an unhappy ending.

The classical example of this type of ending is in the film Casablanca where Rick gives up the love of his life for a higher purpose, the higher purpose which is developed in the middle of the film. So even in the linear form of story telling the ending can be ambivalent so long as it does not clash with what has gone before but builds on it. Or to quote William Goldman (script writer of the film, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), "the key to all story endings is to give the audience what it wants, but not in the way it expects."

Many of the "endings" that follow the form of story telling where there is no structure, only a pattern of inter-connecting events, (see diagram on left), often have no clear beginning and may have non-endings where little conflict is resolved. Here the beauty of the story is in the "journey" not the "destination." Many a travelogue and nature video fall into this category. The success of these videos depends on their content interesting specialist audiences. Flowers and butterflies, even if they are photographed superbly, may not hold the interest of a general audience. So when making your next travelogue try and introduce a problem to solve e.g., weather or bad travelling companions, or an activity to do by a certain time or before the weather breaks.

Whatever story you wish to tell in your next video, be aware that there are other ways of structuring the video than the conventional beginning, middle and end. Often the use of flash-backs or flash-forwards can capture the audience's attention immediately, then it's up to the strength of your story telling to hold that attention until there is a resolution or perhaps no resolution.

Whatever model of story telling you choose, please do not choose the random walk model as diagrammatically present on the right. Here the beginning and end of the video are separated by a random collection of events which may or may not be related to any theme. Such a mishmash of shots, with no clear relationship to the beginning or the end, will not only confuse the audience but quickly lead to boredom, the very audience response we are trying to avoid. So how can you check out your video for audience appeal? If you have teenage children or grandchildren, show them your video, they are your toughest critics. If you get a "not bad" from them after watching your latest edited "masterpiece" then you know you have a potential competition winner!

"The secret of a good sermon is to have a good beginning and a good ending;
and to have the two as close together as possible." - George Burns