2 Indians,1 Russian, 16 Americans, and a crowd of 20 English & Welsh students walk into a bar…
No it’s not the start of a joke, it’s the start Transatlantic Storytelling. The 2024 episode.
Well, not quite the start, as this year’s story began online in January with a series of virtual hook-ups, online breakouts and a quickly established student WhatsApp group. We didn’t all walk into a bar together until about 6 weeks later, on a fresh, crisp March night in Cardiff.
The group of young students (and slightly older staff) might study 3800 miles apart, but when they all got together for the first time in person (at the Roxy Lanes Bowling Alley in Cardiff) you would’ve thought we had all grown up on the same street and vacationed together every summer since.
We might come from different corners of our planet, with different backgrounds, cultures, politics & faiths but we are united by one thing, and it’s not sport.
It’s stories.
Our own stories, each others stories. New stories. Ancient stories. Your story. Any stories. We are addicted to storytelling.
This whole project is about finding, sharing and telling stories. So developing that curiosity for discovering stories is something the staff at both institutions take very seriously. It’s different to journalism. Even though we are all journalists as well. We are trying to teach our cohorts to make stories, not break stories.
This is a pioneering pedagogic project where we bring together two groups of students from opposite edges of the Atlantic and challenge them to become a well oiled, highly creative, professional, industry standard, storytelling machine.
Within a couple of weeks.
It’s like a reality TV show for content creators.
We put them together for 12 days and ask them to tell stories in a myriad of ways; on Live TV Programmes, chat shows, live-streams, podcasts, promos, features and documentaries.
It’s intense. It’s fast.
But when people ask me what’s the most important skill needed to succeed in the sport media industry, I always say, “the ability to build meaningful relationships, really fast”.
Yes we want you to shoot, edit, interview, write, light, record, report, break news, make graphics, attract eyeballs, trend, go viral and all the rest of it. That’s bread and butter. Input and output. But if you can’t get on with someone quickly then forget all of those things.
Ours is an industry where if you want to get on in your career, you need to get on with the people you meet. Swiftly. There is no time to start off on the wrong foot. No time for egos. No bush to beat about.
One day this industry will pair you up with a camera operator on a shoot, someone you’ve never met before, sometimes in a land you’ve never been before. Other days this job puts you in an edit suite for weeks on end, with no windows, sitting with someone you’ve previously never sat next to before.
This profession will regularly cram you into a broadcast truck, parked outside a stadium, in a distant cordoned off corner of the car park, packed with replay directors, VT co-ords, EVS operators, technicians, analysts, sound engineers and vision mixers. Many of whom you’ll be working with for the first time.
This industry regularly expects you to point a camera at people, shine a light on them, in a darkened room, and ask them to talk about the most sensitive, personal, emotional subjects they’ve ever spoken about. And they’ve only just walked in. Barely sat down.
Or we get to stop someone on a sideline straight after the full time buzzer to ask them how they feel about the game they just witnessed when they are still buzzing with adrenaline or frothing with anger, still processing the moment that game was won or lost.
That’s what we do. It’s what we’re good at.
And for me that was one of the key takeaways when our American friends came to Cardiff this Spring. Collaboration is a buzzword right now. Everyone is craving a colab. But in sport’s TV it’s all we ever knew.
We were always trying to teach the students that those softest of social skills are the best ones; constant curiosity, a dose of humility, sprinkles of subtlety, and a wide open mind.
Our American friends epitomised that spirit, parked their preconceptions when they flashed their passports at check in, took time to learn about each others cultures, faith, favourite sports, foods, philosophies and politics. Got up to speed quickly, and then got down to work.
I’m serious, if only the rest of the world could get on like this group of students did we could all stop worrying at night.
For 12 days in Wales, we watched these soft skills play out in real time. In castles, classrooms, cafes, stadiums, studios, bars, beaches and on the touchlines and gantries at sports matches, our Transatlantic Storytellers got on with each other, and got on with their work.
It was beautiful to see the speed of the creative process moving through the project. Ideas developing into reality before some of us had taken a sip of our morning coffee.
Day 2 there was a visit to the castle. The tour guide at the castle was a singer. He had a gig that night in town. 3 hours later the students were in a bar watching that tour guide sing. And boy could he sing. Before his set had finished the group had convinced him to appear in their documentary. From castle, to concept, to capture in less than 3 moves.
On Day 3 we introduced the group to a performance poet (Duke Al Durham) a Cardiff boy, a Met graduate, a hot property across Wales right now. The American students had heard a quote they liked: “If you want something to grow, plant it in Wales”. They gave the quote to Duke as a start point. A day later Duke had written a poem called “Seed” about how ideas are planted, how they grow, how sport and creativity connects us.
By the end of the week our bar singing tour guide from the castle and the local performance poet were on our campus, in our studio, playing their words and music together. Harmoniously. Collaboratively. Creatively. This priceless ability to get people on board, to buy in to your vision, quickly, is what epitomises this project.
Persuasiveness. Trust. Clarity. Communication. Difficult things to teach, easy to learn.
We were putting new commentary teams together on Tuesday to commentate live matches on Wednesday. On teams they had never seen before. Covering sports they had never heard of. Prep fast, learn fast. Make mistakes fast and move on faster.
We were putting groups of students together at breakfast, to go make a podcast about something at lunchtime, and get it published by dinner.
What all this means is that when these students start out in the real world they won’t be phased by deadlines, or the daily demands of a content hungry industry. They’ll be turning ideas into reality before some of their competitors have set up their tripods. These students, will find it all so much easier because they can get on with the people they are working with. Because they are storytellers.
So what happened to the one about the Russian, the Indians, the Americans, the English and the Welsh guys…who all walked into a bar…
They all got on. No joke.
Epilogue
This morning I had an interview for a freelance producer job at the Olympics. It was over Zoom. The panel were at the Olympic HQ in Spain, I was in my home in Wales and the job will be in Paris. Every question they asked me I told them a story. I had 30 minutes to get on with them. If you want to make an impact, then stories are the best way to tell someone about your skills and previous experiences. Not lists. I prepared 5 relevant stories and I managed to get all 5 of my stories somewhere into the interview. The first story was about the time my Dad took me to see the USA Dream Team at the Olympics in Barcelona back in 1992. One was about backpacking my way to a press pass at the Sydney Olympics in 2000. I had a few about 2012 London Olympics and one about this weird bee-keeping outfit made of netting which I wore to bed for 3 weeks in Rio during the 2016 Olympics, as an attempt to avoid catching the Zika Virus.
I got the job. 45 years old. And still telling stories as a way to get jobs in Sports Media. Our stories never stop.