Ethnography in Fast-Forward and Rewind, Notes on Making the Video Program Under Another Sun
Essay by David Plath, Producer

Sojourners attract the scholarly eye only in particular circumstances. They inhabit an ethnographic limbo somewhere between tourists and emigrants. The academically proper like to sneer at the tourist for not learning anything about a place he visits and to pity the emigrant for being obligated to acculturate. The sojourner lives in a locale long enough to learn some local conventions and to identify with the people without needing to go native.

Under Another Sun, released in September 2001 by the Media Production Group, brings into focus the 30,000 Japanese now living and working in Singapore. It profiles Japanese sojourners from an array of careers and professions, and sketches earlier phases of Japanese sojourning in Asia. It explores tensions between the expatriates' attachments to their native land and their desires to shed some of the burdens imposed on them when living at home in Japanese society. And it examines the special challenge that Japanese in Singapore must confront: coming to terms with the history of Japanese involvement in Southeast Asia over the last 150 years.

In the notes that follow, I offer examples of how the process of documentary video production and post-production have influenced the video.


Subtitles and Voice-Overs
A broadcast program will probably be viewed by one or two persons sitting at home positioned where they can read subtitles easily. If the program is screened in a classroom, however (not many classrooms being endowed with a projection system) students in the back rows will have trouble seeing. So for practical reasons of readability, I prefer to use subtitles sparingly.

My team makes its videos for English-fluent audiences, primarily in the United States. So life will be simpler for the audience as well as the production team if everybody in a program speaks English with ease. Well, what do we do when a person on camera is speaking a language other than English? (Let's call it Japanese, since that has been the second language in most of the programs my team has made.) We can superimpose a spoken translation or "voice-over" in English. This eliminates the readability problem but leaves us instead with a problem of audibility.

First, somebody has to do the translating. Then somebody has to recruit and coach native English speakers to do the voicing. And their voice qualities (age, gender, eloquence, gentleness or stridency and so on) should approximate those of their Japanese counterparts, or at least be similar enough so as to not draw audience attention away from the content of the message being uttered.

Next, somebody has to hire a studio and an audio engineer to record the English voices. And since it is conventional to have Japanese utterances audible in the background while the English voice-overs are heard, utterance and translation need to be trimmed to about the same length, and volume-levels on the two audio tracks have to be balanced carefully during final editing. Recording, editing and mixing thus take longer and cost more than if the voices were English-only.

But what should we do if the person on camera is speaking English with voice qualities that make it difficult for the listener to decipher? In Under Another Sun the problem arose with Joe Ide, the entrepreneur. Audio-visual recording blurs or blots out some of the behavioral cues that are present when you are conversing face-to-face. And some people are uncomfortable when coaxed to speak in the presence of a camera, microphone, and camera crew. Much as I dislike doing so, I occasionally have to insert English subtitles even though the utterances are in English. (Superimpose an English voice-over on top of an English utterance and the result is like something out of a Woody Allen movie.)

Each Japanese person who speaks to the camera in Under Another Sun has the ability to converse in everyday English. We recorded some participants using English only (e.g., Ms. Abe, the cosmetics executive). Most of the others began in English but after a few minutes we invited them to switch to Japanese. In English their comments and gestures and phrasings were too stilted, or their hesitation pauses were too long, etc. Viewers might think the person obtuse or juvenile or uneducated. And the program would lack the you-are-there flavor and spontaneity that are video's strong suit.


Why So Many Lower-Thirds?
In the jargon of media production, "lower-thirds" are the titles that identify an individual in view on the image screen at that moment. Editors conventionally place the words in the lowest one-third of the screen. Lower-thirds pop up frequently in the newest AEMS video program Under Another Sun: Japanese in Singapore. Some viewers find them distracting, and ask if there aren't too many of them. Why do we so often identify people speaking on camera?

It would be enough to identify a speaker once or twice if the program only were to be seen straight through in one sitting. But MPG's policy is to format our videos for two different types of use. One is broadcasting over public and cable channels, the other is narrowcasting in classrooms.

For broadcast use a program must stand-alone. A viewer should be able to comprehend its main ideas in a single viewing. Classroom instructors, on the other hand, are more likely to screen just one or two segments in a class period, reserving 30 or 40 minutes of time for lecturing and discussion. With this in mind, Under Another Sun has been formatted as a sequence of eight segments plus an introduction and conclusion, each five to seven minutes long. This allows educators to position the segment pedagogically within the context of their course, which may have little to do with the context-of-presentation operant in the program. Our hope is that pieces of the program will also prove useful in courses that have nothing to do with Japan or Singapore or East Asia or migration studies.

Therefore if each segment is to be usable independently then the people talking on camera need to be identified at least once in every segment in which they are seen. Anonymous talking heads tend to be seen as less authoritative and persuasive.


Money Constraints
The wheel of video production drives you to do ethnography fast-forward. The legendary Lone Ethnographer can hang out long enough to witness events as they erupt spontaneously or are triggered by calendars and other modes of parochial scheduling. As an ethno-videomaker, lone or teamed, you can't loll in such a luxury of time. You have to encourage events to occur when your camera is ready to record them, or else coax the locals to re-enact them.

Time is money also in post-production: professional studios charge $800-$1200 per day for the services of an editor and rental of an editing system. You had better have detailed shot-logs in hand for every one of your field tapes (the Singapore project generated more than 70 half-hour tapes), and have your rough-cut program adzed into shape before you carry your project to the studio. And to complicate matters, some funding agencies pay only after the fact. After, that is, they have received a copy of the completed program. Your reward, if all goes well, can be a program that will transmit your message to hundreds, even thousands of people who would regard reading The American Anthropologist as cruel and unusual punishment.

Making documentary programs has taught me to be suspicious about those how-to-do-it handbooks that show ethnographic production moving in a tidy sequence of stages of work. From start to finish in video production you are obliged to think about audiences every bit as much as "informants." Long before you uncap a lens and plug in a microphone you should be asking yourself how the scene would play in Peoria. The physical work of video production has its share of linear sequences, no more reversible than the moving finger of the Rubaiyat. But in the mental labor of video production, your imagined tape is speeding fast-forward and rewinding all the time.