The most prominent assets of any of the festivals I will address further in the book, are discussions with fellow creators from abroad during which you can articulate your ideas and problems that you are dealing with or compare the level of the audio production worldwide. The examples that I will present in this chapter reflect topics that are still discussed today.

At audio festivals worldwide, the authors present at the discussion sessions address the methods of recording, working with sound, soundscape, creative tendencies in various countries, diverse ways of narration and storytelling, literary text adaptations used in programmes, individual elements of feature composition and so on. These aspects are important for the radio creators of all genres and fields; however, it is not common for them to have so much space for discussing the topic with such a focus. They are provided with an opportunity to obtain international feedback, which is rare because outside of the conferences and professional gatherings, the makers receive minimal or no feedback on their work at all.

The next chapter addresses the crucial topics discussed around the world; nevertheless, it is still only a small sample of wide scale of important talking-points regarding the documentary and feature making. Some of the following rules and information are basics for every documentary maker, so if you are a master of the craft, you can feel free to flip through the next chapter. However, as Siobhán McHugh charmingly notes, documentary making “is like knitting. By all means knit whatever items you want and invent your own designs, but don’t drop stitches: get the basics right!” (McHugh 2022: 251). Well, to be honest, McHugh speaks about podcasts in her statement, but I think the message is universal.

Podcasts

They say that the world of the radio has three parts: music, radio, and podcasts. “Radio’s flirty first cousin, podcasting, arrived quietly as a tech innovation in 2001 and as a term in 2004, then exploded as a pop-culture phenomenon in 2014” (McHugh 2022: 5). In September 2004, the term “podcast” had only 24 results in a Google search, but in 2005 it was already 57 million hits (McHugh 2022: 101). And in 2014, Apple embedded a podcast app in its smartphone, so anyone who wanted could use it and listening started to be really easy. That year, the American podcast show Serial was also released, which caused a “podcast epidemy”—in the U.S., everyone listened to it, and everyone wanted to create “something like it”.

Over the span of 12 episodes, Serial presents the story of a high-schooler, Hae Min Lee, who went missing in 1999, and her dead body was found a month later in the park. Her ex-boyfriend Adnan Syed was convicted of murder but never confessed to the crime. The documentary maker Sarah Koenig studied all the available materials, court files, and various testimonies connected to the case and tried to find out whether or not Adnan was guilty as well as to find answers to many unanswered questions. The series was co-created and is co-produced by Koenig and Julie Snyder and developed by This American Life. Having episodes drop weekly created an in-built anticipation, the team wanted to make audio storytelling compulsive. Serial was a turning point in the world of nonfiction serial podcasts, theoreticians distinguish podcasting before 2014 and after 2014 (McHugh 2022: 108). The series had five million downloads in the first six weeks after its launch in 2014; at the beginning of 2021 it struck 250 million just for the first season.

In the year 2022, there were over two million podcasts on iTunes and more than 43 million distinct episodes online (McHugh 2022: 5) Despite this fast and pervasive development of podcasts, in various European countries, podcasts are still in their infancy, which confirms my abovementioned statement—that there is a lack of information about European documentary makers among the communities of American creators and vice versa. While in English speaking countries, Serial has its name, and also inspired many creators to set-up their own podcast, listeners from the Czech Republic hardly heard of the show. In the Czech Republic the boom of podcasts has been a matter of several recent years.

In 2006, the podcast was introduced at the International Feature Conference as a brand-new phenomenon, and creators asked, outraged: “Who is going to pay me $500 for a programme that can be downloaded from the internet?” (Hanáčková 2006: 5). But today, podcasts come in all sounds, lengths, languages, and forms, they could be just unsubstantial chatting, fascinating sound art, deep and personal storytelling, or advertising of new cars. Podcast, put simply, is a digital form of audio downloaded from the internet or streamed online on a smartphone or computer; it is a way of conveying information. The word “podcast” is a compound word consisting of the word “broadcast” and the word “pod” (an abbreviation for Personal on Demand). The term pod was coined by the Apple Company, which developed devices called iPods—these were the devices on which podcasts were listened to (McLeish and Link 2016: 54).Footnote 1

“While radio functions as a secondary medium, podcast is more of an active switch-on medium. Listeners consciously decide to listen to a particular podcast (this can, of course, also happen with radio programmes, but is much more usual with podcasts). This kind of reception has a direct impact on the attitude that prevails in the respective medium. Radio presenters must always expect to gain or lose listeners. Constant localisation (time, programme, location) is a part of the basics of classic radio presentation. Podcast hosts can allow themselves much more freedom, flexibility and thus also individuality. In podcasts, intimacy and privacy are not only a question of the subject matter, but also of the approach, the attitude with which a host meets their community” (Preger 2021: 17). This means that the radio is a kind of “flow” medium, always streaming, a near-constant companion. But podcast has its beginning and end, we play it when we want to listen to it, when we create the right environment for listening. The listening experience can be profound when the podcast is listened to through headphones. When you hear the sound “deep in your head”, the reaction could be almost physical. The undeniable advantage of podcasts lies in the possibility of listening to them anywhere at any time; you do not need to be connected to the internet or be near a radio set. Podcasts allow listeners to choose programmes in which they are primarily interested, which is a real benefit, as opposed to streamed radio broadcasts, the content of which is dictated by someone else. “In radio we speak of programming; in podcasting, we talk about a program” (Spinelli and Dann in Preger 2021: 17). We usually listen to podcasts when we know that we can follow, or we want to get involved in the story. This also means that listeners WANTED to listen to the podcast, they chose it and desired it. They decided to turn it on. However, in radio, which is “always there”, is sometimes more important just to stop the listener from turning it off, rather than tuning in.

Eric Nuzum, the author of the book Make Noise: A Creator’s Guide to Podcasting and Great Audio Storytelling, believes that “[a]udio isn’t going away, it’s everywhere” (Duffy 2013). Due to podcasts being available online, listening options limited to regions or countries disappear. The geographical location of the listeners does not determine what they can listen to. Instead, they themselves choose based on the topic of the programme and its method of creation. For this reason, podcasts are so successful that listeners may select out whatever they are truly interested in and what they really want to listen to.

While the younger generation does not consider this approach to be a privilege but rather a default, some creators of the older generation are still getting used to it. The Russian journalist Vladimir Kryuchev prefers the traditional manner of listening to radio: “When you switch on your radio at a certain time, it is like you meet a friend. It is very good to have a podcast in your smartphone and to be able to listen to it whenever you want, but there’s something special about meeting a friend at a certain time; there is a story behind it. You don’t have your friend always in your pocket like you have a podcast in your pocket” (OH Kryuchev 2019). Kryuchev’s opinion, however, comes from 2019, i.e., the time before the major technological development inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic happened. Furthermore, for a long time now, even archives of digital broadcasts have been available online for listeners at any time, regardless of whether the genre is a podcast. However, a kind of ritualisation of listening to radio is quite moving and understandable. On the other hand, the American producer Johanna ZornFootnote 2 stresses the community aspect of listening to podcasts when listeners wait for the premiere of a new episode, which is announced on the target platform for a specific date and time. Anyone interested in listening worldwide may play the episode at the same given moment and thus share their listening experience with others in the same way as if they were waiting for a meeting with a friend, as Kryuchev puts it.

The Czech documentary maker Daniel MoravecFootnote 3 believes that podcasts are necessary for the development of radio documentary production. In his view, the numbers for linear streamed broadcasts are on the decline, and slowly, online broadcast listening numbers start to prevail: “It is important to distinguish between podcast as a type of technology and as a subgenre. In the Czech Republic, everything that is uploaded to the internet and may be downloaded from there by a listener is called a podcast. However, a documentary created as a podcast follows different criteria than a regular documentary. In terms of time, the podcast option is more generous. The listener can pause the programme, rewind back to a specific point, or read the script at the same time” (OH Moravec 2018).

The French-Canadian author Neil SandellFootnote 4 offers his perspective: “I think the podcast world is giving to the radio documentary production an enormous future because the public broadcasters are not the only way of telling your story” (OH Sandell 2018). He goes on to add: “Successful podcasts are made by smart people who imitate other successful podcasts and people who hear things that work, that they hadn’t thought of, so they’ll take new styles, new moves, new approaches to storytelling. For example, the success of the serial form of This American LifeFootnote 5 really set everyone to do a true crime podcast” (OH Sandell 2018). If you want to understand, analyse, and later also use the techniques from successful podcasts, you need to be really attentive, but yes, storytelling is a craft and can be learned. Observing others is a great way to do so—but it also does not mean that you must imitate successful production to be successful too. You don’t need to adopt everything uncritically. Every producer knows what works for him or her and what doesn’t. And when you learn and master the basic rules of telling a story, you can break them and create your own ones.

Leaving the documentary podcasts aside for the time being, podcasts, in general, as a recording and broadcasting technique do not require any special recording methods or even devices. Today, podcasts can be recorded on a mobile phone, and given that they are not broadcasted primarily on a radio but rather online, listeners often do not mind somewhat imperfect sounds. The evolution of personal digital recording devices and the financial availability thereof liberates the creative environment. Due to this fact, even laypeople and beginners may contribute to the global radio market. Even though documentary production worships high-quality sounds and stereophony, the quality of the recordings may be pushed aside in favour of conveying the information quickly.

Today, the audience used to seriality finds podcasts convenient. In chat-casts (podcasts based on interviews and host chatting with a guest), listeners want to know “what happens next”, who will be the following guest introduced by their favourite host. The character of the “podcaster”, a person who hosts the programme, plays a significant role, as the listeners choose the programmes not only based on the discussed topic but also according to who they wish to listen to and who they like (the kind of celebrity cult definitely plays a role in the selection process). Documentary podcasts often focus on the true crime genre and use the multiple episode approach, thanks to Serial, the personalised host voice has also become an important part of podcast journalism. “For the listener, you are a main character whether you think you are or not” (McHugh 2022: 173). The difference between the radio presenter and the podcast host is significant—hosts can reveal themselves as real people, with fears and weaknesses, but presenters are often “serious” public figures. “Even the term podcast ‘host’ versus radio ‘presenter’ is a giveaway. A host is someone who invites you to their home, or some personal part of their life; a ‘presenter’ is a professional communicator” (McHugh 2022: 56).

There is also a difference between the way in which the radio and podcast audiences are labelled—regarding radio broadcasting, we tend to speak about listeners; regarding the podcast, there is a community. This is also because podcasts often aim at niche target groups (e.g., fans of board games, audiences of various TV shows, readers of new works in the literature, people interested in politics, etc.). Sometimes, they make use of new items on the market and the need of the audience to deepen their specific knowledge. Thus, not all podcasts are suitable for a broad segment of the audience, as the programmes may be strongly affected by their topic or narrative style. The creators are usually aware of the group of listeners they address and can thus adjust their storytelling, the pace of the programmes, and even the vocabulary. The audience of podcasts tends to create communities, and they often feel personally connected with the host of the show. Already in 1930, German playwright, poet and theatre practitioner Bertolt Brecht noted, “Radio could be the most wonderful communication system imaginable (…) could be, that is, if it were capable not only of transmitting, but of receiving, of making the listener hear but also speak, not of isolating him but connecting him” (McHugh 2022: 216). Back then, it was not possible, but today, listeners can easily reach the host of almost every show and share their thought with him or her.

Since podcasts are created primarily for online broadcasts, in theory, there are no limitations regarding the content or form thereof. The creators are thus faced with the vast free space they can use and that they would never be provided with within a public radio broadcast. Podcast creators may play with sounds; they can compose their programmes on the verge of sound art and make multilayered experimental pieces. The American creator Julie Shapiro recalls the beginnings of documentary podcasts in the U.S.: “We thought—wow, no rules. Anyone can do anything. And then we were so disappointed to hear everything sounded exactly like a standard public radio fair” (OH Shapiro 2019).

Podcasts are extremely popular in the USA—and no wonder as podcasts in the English language bear a major (global) fan potential. In contrast, if you create a podcast, for instance, in the Czech Republic, the fan base is automatically reduced to those who understand the language, which means that the programme reaches Slovakia or Poland at maximum. Moreover, the American broadcast system differs from the European broadcast system. Organisations funded privately with their own funds (or via donations by listeners) prevail, yet they broadcast on a national level. Even though they resemble the European public broadcast system, they are not funded by the government. Looking back to history, one will find that while American public radio and television were associated with advertising and selling broadcast time right from the beginning, Europe deals with the cultural role of the medium, and the European approach, in this area, is characterised by government interventions (Motal 2012: 74). The major difference between the podcast market and public radio production lies in the possibility of having an exact idea about the number of listeners and being able to adjust the content of the following episodes immediately. Of course, radio and TV allow for the creation of listening statistics; however, the process is usually very protracted, and the maker cannot secure them for personal use. While creating podcasts, the creators are always aware of who listens to their programmes, in what part of the programmes the listening numbers decline or increase, at what point people turn the programme off or whether they skip any episodes altogether. Besides radio and podcasts, there is a competing market in the form of Spotify, YouTube and other platforms, where the statistics are calculated automatically and immediately. The Italian creator Jonathan Zenti believes that European public radio has missed the opportunity. He concludes: “I want to say that I am not the guy that says that the only future is in podcasting and that public radio is dead. If this happens, I am not looking forward to this situation. My ideal future is to work in podcasting and experiment outside to make the public radio alive, to show them that they can reach a bigger audience that they are not reaching now, but they can still do the traditional radio as it has always been done—but with this new technology of digital radio and audio” (OH Zenti 2018).

The Changes in the Narration in Podcasts

The following sort of categorisation of podcasts can be found on the listening platforms regarding the content of the series: society and culture, news, true crime, comedy, lifestyle, health, tech, education, etc. Sometimes, the podcasts are sorted by format: talk show or chat-cast, interviews, panel discussions, narrative storytelling, etc., or just nonfiction, fiction, conversation and experimental (McHugh 2022: 10).

In the Czech Republic, documentaries and features are called “authorial”, as creators are responsible for all the elements, from recording through editing to distribution. Podcast creators who work alone or with a small creative team sometimes face a similar problem, and in addition to recording and postproduction, they have to deal with good marketing. If they do not promote their programme sufficiently, it may simply be lost in the avalanche of other podcasts. Moreover, the podcast culture is based on the fact that the audience actively searches for them—the listeners customise the content they are interested in—thus, it is much more important for the podcast creators to be skilled at advertising. Radio documentaries, presented in streamed broadcasts, may be listened to by many people even without any publicity. Podcasts, on the other hand, would not be found without proper marketing, as listeners would not know about them at all.

Edwin Brys voices his opinion on podcasts: “Of course, if you do it all by yourself, there is temptation to do it in a simpler way. That means to give some parts of the story away, you take the easiest solution—that is just voice and narration. So, in podcasts, you often find a lot of narration and a lack of scenes. Scenes are more complicated to record” (OH Brys 2018). Because there are fewer scenes in podcasts and hosts have the tendency to explain the topic verbally, the programmes often end up having “too many words” and lacking “action”—the structure thereof contradicts the principle of Show, Don’t Tell, which is often applied in the drama literature, scriptwriting, or production of fiction, as well as in documentary radio and audio-visual programmes. In a simplified form applied to the medium of radio, if it is possible to show something to the listener in any way by using a scene, sound and so on, the author should strive for it since, may times, this way is much more appealing to the audience. Of course, the principle of Show, Don’t Tell cannot be used dogmatically; in various cases, intervention by the narrator is necessary. In terms of audio and audio-visual production, I would compare showing to simply adding a scene of a mother and a daughter arguing rather than describing verbally that they have a complicated relationship. The viewer/listener immediately understands the mutual dynamic. Employing scenes allows listeners to use their imagination: the richness of sound, variability of situations and different sound environments evoke feelings, thoughts, ideas and even memories in listeners’ minds. A “theatre for the ears and for the soul” is thus launched. In addition to using scenes, incorporating direct speech is desirable, as it can be recorded during the interview or replicated by one of the characters. The listeners’ imagination would be better inspired by “Never come back. I won’t give you any more food” than “I told him that I didn’t want him to come back to mine anymore and that I would never feed him again”. Direct speech is one way of showing.

I personally prefer employing scenes and sound shortcuts rather than verbal descriptions in my programmes. For example, my programme Matěj,Footnote 6 which won Prix Bohemia, Government Board Award, Czech Journalism Award and REPORT Award, was created without any comments recorded in the studio. The main character, Matěj, suffers from extensive autism with signs of Asperger’s syndrome, but he also has the perfect pitch and phenomenal memory; he studies to become a caregiver and he loves to go to cafés. The feature is full of the scenes from Matěj’s life—he argues with his four brothers about who is going to set the table, he meets his newborn nephew for a first time, he goes to see a play written by his sister… Matěj has very distinctive way of communication—he mainly quotes sentences from famous movies and fairy tales, but delivers them in moments, when it’s completely accurate. Matěj is a strong character and talented storyteller. My voice appears in the documentary, but in natural situations, as I created a really strong bond with Matěj and experienced many adventures with him. “When you tell people something, they forget it, but when you show it to them, make them imagine it in their own minds, they remember it. This is how it becomes real” (Biewen and Dilworth 2010: 29).

Unfortunately, in podcasts, creators and hosts often resort to telling rather than showing, and it is no exception that they do not prepare the narration; they talk off-the-cuff and leave many mistakes and slips on the tongue in the final cut of the programme. This is a major difference compared to the beginnings of documentary production in the 1960s when the programmes also consisted of spoken words; nevertheless, they were very well thought-out and prepared in advance. The American creator Julie Shapiro critically sees this aspect of podcast production: “There is nothing written anymore, there’s no authorship, there’s just ego. There are just people showing up and talking. Therefore, we are further and further away from the idea that this can be thoughtful. And the ones that are that way are not appreciated by the vast majority of podcast audiences” (OH Shapiro 2019). In her reflection, Shapiro refers to a significant aspect, i.e., the way the audience has changed. Due to their accessibility, podcasts are popular with a broad spectrum of listeners who, however, do not focus on documentary podcasts but rather on lifestyle, opinion-journalistic, news, and entertainment and who search for an uncomplicated type of audio production that could be listened to while dealing with other activities. Hence, these formats are provided with greater financial support from sponsors and, in comparison with documentary podcasts, have a better chance of evolving. Julie Shapiro concludes, “News, current affairs, and entertainment—that is where the sponsorships are. The artful work is still not going to be anybody’s priority except for the artists” (OH Shapiro 2019).

Documentary Podcasts

In this subchapter, considering the character of this book, I will primarily address documentary podcasts. Because even important or educational radio can sound beautiful, and I want to give some examples of series that prove it.

Many documentary podcasts bear the characteristics of the regular feature, i.e., they use sound effects, record reportage scenes, and do not hesitate to use a phone call or a call conducted via Skype or WhatsApp to make things more interesting. The development of podcasts continues to undeniably progress, and they slowly find their place in the sun within the world of the radio documentary; however, their means of expression are, in many ways, much different from the traditional approach to documentary narration.

Podcasts are, in fact, a manner of distribution—a platform that may be used for sharing the artistic content of various genres. Podcasts are not radio programmes even though radio programmes can be made available as podcasts. Nonetheless, the documentary podcasts should employ more methods that are applicable to other audio documentary productions and not merely for simplistic journalistic interviews or even monologues. A good documentary podcast should not shy away from the multilayered structure of the programme; it should strive for good quality storytelling and follow the rules for documentary production. Creators should make full use of the whole spectrum of possibilities of working with sound as doing a good job in this respect (editing, archival material, montage, interviews with different people, musical aspects, different perspectives, etc.) will yield a much more impressive result than just a simple interview. The topic in question needs to be examined from multiple points of view to understand it and discover new solutions.

There are good podcasts, the quality of which is as high as that of the features or documentaries composed for a regular public radio broadcast. One such example is an American podcast called the Radio Diaries, which features the audio diaries recorded by the protagonists themselves over periods of times of varied length. The creators of individual episodes subsequently process hours and hours of the recorded material into shorter and condensed documentaries, which are usually full of the recorded scenes and intimate confessions from the protagonists’ lives. Joe Richman, the founder of Radio Diaries, described the process of selecting the material from the recorded diaries as follows: “It is like mining for gold. Ninety percent is junk, but then every so often, there are few magical moments that are completely unexpected. Details emerge about people that, in an interview, I would never have thought to ask about” (Biewen and Dilworth 2010: 130).

Other instances of good podcasts positioned on the edge of journalism and documentary production include a news programme called All Things Considered or a weekly podcast This American Life (TAL) which is also broadcasted on radio. Each week, the creators of TAL choose a topic that links stories presented in the following episode. “TAL describes itself, tongue-in-cheek, as ‘a documentary show for people who hate documentaries.’ It applies artistic production techniques from layered soundtrack to actuality, blended with edited interview, often with a quirky narrator presence. Since its premiere in 1995 on the WBEZ public radio in Chicago, TAL has provided moving, off-beat and intimate portraits of ordinary American lives: stories about mundane-seeming topics like babysitting, sissies or summer camps, or transformative events like being a transplant recipient, or the subject of a police chase” (McHugh 2012: 21). Even though the abovementioned programmes do not have complex structures, makers always strive to tell powerful life stories with captivating plots, elements of humour and unexpected twist at the ends, which are labelled as “little movies for radio” (THIS AMERICAN LIFE, © 2020). The founder of This American Life Ira Glass claimed that each story presented there has a point and a “moment of reflection”—drawing attention to a certain matter or being a part of a broader topic (Biewen and Dilworth 2010: 10). The comparison to the “movies for radio” does, in a way, intersect with Braun’s idea of the “acoustic film” or “acoustic feature”.

Another example is the independent podcast 99% Invisible, which focuses on everyday topics about which we often do not even think. It was launched by the host Roman Mars (among others, a cofounder of the Radiotopia podcast platform). Mars’s approach to recording clearly illustrates the technological possibilities of making podcasts as the first seasons were recorded and produced by Mars from the comfort of his own bedroom (99% INVISIBLE, © 2020). RadioLab, a series produced by the American radio station WNYC, also offers topics dealt with in a documentary way, and sees itself as a platform for long-form journalism and storytelling, as does the website Transom.org.

The Canadian podcasts Love Me and The Heart focused on presenting stories that often stand on the edge of journalism, documentary, and feature. Both address intimate personal stories and delicate topics in a very sensitive way.

All the podcasts mentioned in the last three paragraphs come from the USA or Canada. The popularity of podcasts in the USA is confirmed by high listening numbers when each episode of TAL is listened to by 2.2 million radio listeners every week and another 3.6 million people download each episode as a podcast (THIS AMERICAN LIFE, © 2020). The 99% Invisible podcast was downloaded, over its entire existence, by over 400 million users and the number keeps growing (99% INVISIBLE, © 2020). Many American podcasts with documentary aspects were created for the Radiotopia platform; a detailed overview of the programmes categorised according to topic can be found on the website.

Julie Shapiro, the Vice President of Radiotopia, offers her view: “I think it is a real shame that people are looking to podcasts mostly for news, information, chats and celebrities. Storytelling is the main content of Radiotopia; we try to present storytelling at its best. It is still not feature making; it’s still like an American version of the best storytelling” (OH Shapiro 2019).

In the United Kingdom, the BBC 4’s programme called ShortCuts is very popular among documentary magazines, and it is possible to download it later as a podcast. Similarly, on Czech Radio, the DokuVlna (DocuWave),Footnote 7 Dokumoment (Documoment) and Dokuseriál (Docuseries) series work in the same format.

Today, the technological possibilities allow for more experimentation, and with podcasts, listeners may listen to their favourite programmes at any time at any place, which actually helps with the statistics. The chair of the International Feature Conference, Silvia Lahner,Footnote 8 claims that “[i]t’s the golden age of audio. It is a revival of audio. And all thanks to the podcasts. So, I think we will profit from this” (OH Lahner 2019).

Lahner also admitted that, today, it has to be expected that young makers are interested in formats other than those that were once produced at the beginning of documentary production. Lahner insists that “[i]f we don’t want to die as dinosaurs we need to open the IFC up to anything which is within the frame of being traditionally produced” (OH Lahner 2018). In addition, the British documentary maker Laurence Grissell noted that currently, documentary production has undergone major changes in terms of form and distribution, and the community should be ready for any advantages or disadvantages accompanying these transformations (OH Grissell 2019).

Differences in European and Overseas Audio Production

A lack of information about European documentary makers among communities of the American and Australian creators and vice versa is inevitable. In her book The Power of Podcasting Siobhán McHugh presents this example: “Back in 2018, I ran another podcasting session in Sydney for a delegation of cosmopolitan CRI broadcasters. I hesitated before showing a slide about Serial. It was by then hitting 500 million downloads—surely it was old hat? ‘What do you know about Serial?’ I asked, before hitting play. There was a perplexed pause. ‘Isn’t it something Westerners like to eat for breakfast?’ one man politely ventured. He wasn’t trying to be funny” (McHugh 2022: 225). That confirms that even though some show is a hit in one country, in another it could be completely unknown. The production in individual countries is still affected by the geographical location of the creators, the situation in the specific country and the political and economic circumstances.Footnote 9 The fact is that European production has specific characteristics (even though they differ from one country to the next), as does American one. In general, Europeans tend to record scenes in the field, which might be caused by the fact that countries in Europe are relatively small (compared to the US). Field trips thus do not pose such a large problem in terms of finances or time. Due to the vastness of the continent, American makers leave the studio much less often. For the most part, American production is based on a quality host who introduces the listener to what is happening and strives to verbally describe as much as possible instead of presenting the topic through scenes recorded in the field. Often, recorded phone calls are used to facilitate contact with other interviewees, as phone calls enable contact with people who are even hundreds of kilometres away without the need to travel.

An awarded producer Neil Sandell commented on the differences between the productions of Europe and the USA: “I would say that in the best European documentaries there is almost cinematic quality in them, your imagination gets a wonderful visual sense of it. This is a characteristic of most European documentaries. American documentaries usually have very good sound designs, but they tend to be linear. I am not saying they are not good; it is just a different style” (OH Sandell 2018).

In my experience, the tradition of the artistic documentaries is indeed more typical of Europe. In the USA, journalistic programmes are given preference, and storytelling is often linear; as Sandell argues, there is no layering or playing with timelines; rather, it is narrated directly from point A to point B. Only occasionally are the artistic elements embedded in the programme. In podcasts, listeners can mostly hear spoken words recorded in a closed room—for instance, an hour-long recording of a conversation on a given topic with minimum editing and occasionally divided by music. During the Third Coast International Audio Festival 2018,Footnote 10 I was surprised to notice that the speakers at the lectures were encouraging the creators present in the room to do what the documentary makers in Europe do naturally; in Chicago, however, it was presented as something extraordinary. For example, they mentioned so-called immersion reporting when reporters immerse themselves in the topic they report on. The speakers urged the other creators to never turn the microphone off and record all the little things that the interviewees say and do; to try to fully penetrate the interviewee’s world and consider creating a programme without the omniscient narrator, i.e., the commentary recorded in the studio. In Europe or even in the Czech Republic, however, it is not that exceptional to construct programmes without reporters’ commentary from the studio, as the interviewee serves as the main narrator. The fly on the wall principle was also emphasised.

The Third Coast cofounder Johanna Zorn believes that documentary production in the USA emerged from journalism, whereas in Europe, it came from art, which affects the final edit of the programme in a major way. She admitted that “Americans have a little less patience overall. They want the story to move along faster; they want to know why they should be listening to. Well, I’m like this” (OH Zorn 2018). She goes on to reflect on the matter: “Americans don’t want to spend too much time wondering where they are in the story, what are these sounds… They’re more interested in the narrative arc, beginning, middle, end, resolution at the end. My experience with the European work is more of a sense of allowing yourself to sort of be immersed in the piece, to just trust the producer and going wherever the piece goes” (OH Zorn 2018). In American production, the narrator/commentator often explains anything that could potentially confuse listeners. Based on the first chapter dedicated to the differences between feature and documentary, this means that feature as an artistic genre rises mainly from Europe, while factual documentary is more common in the U.S.

In 2018, Counted: An Oakland Story and John Thompson vs. American Justice programmes won a prize at the Third Coast Festival. The creators decided to use a strong narrator’s part that intertwined with the interviewees’ testimonies and the accompanying music. In the same year, the Danish programme Summer RainFootnote 11 by Nanna Hauge KristensenFootnote 12 won the Best Documentary: Non-English award. The maker does not explain anything in it; she just places one sound image from her life after another, and the listeners are supposed to deduce which life situation Kristensen is dealing with on their own. On the other hand, the two mentioned American programmes bear strong informational value at the expense of the artistic one. We learn a lot of details about crime cases, about the way the judicial system works and so on. Of course, we are talking about different types of programmes here—true crime and almost a poetic one—yet for me, it is a perfect example of the difference between European and American production.

Strong reporters’/narrators’ voices are to be found in European production too, of course, and vice versa, American production includes artistic works based on recording situations. In addition, stories without the added narration recorded in a studio are still “narrated” by the way in which they are edited. Personally, I think that even though the voice of the maker who recorded and edited the programme does not appear in it at all, it is always heard implicitly, as it is the maker who makes the decision about what appears in the programme and what not. The creator is the one holding and directing the microphone, editing, and mixing everything, choosing the music, and it is solely up to him or her what the listeners will finally hear. The whole programme embodies the voice and opinions of the maker, as it would have never existed without him or her.

The listeners are drawn into the story through scenes. European documentary makers often do their best to take the microphone into the field and record their interviewees’ lives as realistically as possible. Some makers prefer live recordings even if the sound is worse, which means that they are not as interested in sound quality as they are in the spontaneity of the scene. The main idea is to let listeners live through the same experiences as the interviewee and get to know their way of living and thinking.

In the USA, podcasts are also much more common which affects the American style of production and storytelling. The American production is characterised mainly by a strong musical element and the role of a narrator who serves as a guide throughout the entire story. According to Sarah Geis, the reason for this deep-rooted position of the host is the prevailing tradition in journalism, where the speaker’s task is to introduce the listener to the context and explain the basic facts. Mia Lindgren and Siobhán McHugh claim that the “American narrator leads the listener by the hand” and explains everything to ensure that the audience will not miss anything and, regardless of when the listeners tune in, they will always be able to navigate the story (Lindgren and McHugh 2013: 108).

In my view, European production is much more nuanced than American production is and offers a broader spectrum of options. In Scandinavian countries, intimate and perfectly executed features are often created that focus on delicate and very personal testimonies (where the narrator also plays an important role). The creators do not shy away from revealing surprising details from the personal lives of the interviewees. The documentaries frequently immerse deeply into the specific topics but simultaneously do not spare the listeners and treat the subject matter in a raw and rather blunt way—in short, they touch the real essence of the problem at hand. In the Czech Republic, Poland and other Eastern countries, sound quality often does not play such a significant role (yet of course, producers try to record their pieces in the highest sound quality); what matters is the message of the field recording. The creators strive for authenticity achieved through making recordings in the field, and sometimes, the natural or other conditions simply do not allow perfectly clear sounds to be recorded. At the same time, these countries see the tendency to make documentaries without the main narrator or with minimal participation thereof, while e.g., in Scandinavia, the narrator often plays the main role. Despite this, the role of the narrator is different than in the U.S., where the narrator often serves as an omniscient commentator; in Scandinavian countries, this role usually involves intimate authorial testimony.

Julie Shapiro, the American author based in Australia, pondered these differences: “The European work was very cinematic to my ears. It was more literary, metaphorical, figurative, deep, and personal. Meticulous in a way. The American work felt very much more story-driven, very narrative, focused on the strength of the character, having a certain energy. When I compare American production to European production, there is the way in which the craft of space and scenes is done—American producers just let things happen” (OH Shapiro 2019).

Of course, this does not mean that the creators from some countries use only one method to make their programmes and that there is no American piece, for example, based on field recordings. The audio production as well as its visual counterpart, literature, or art in general is a very individual endeavour, and it is always up to the creator what method of creation they are going to opt for. Shapiro added, “I heard mystery thrillers from the Danes that would rival any narrative plot of an American story, but still told with this like slightly different expertise. I feel like the feature makers of the Europeans states are retrained. They are trained storytellers, spent months and months, if not years on a single piece. The artfulness of the European work was always so impressive to me” (OH Shapiro 2019). According to Diarmuid McIntyre, the founder of the HearSay Audio Arts Festival,Footnote 13 the authenticity of the European programmes also lies in the fact that they let the audience draw their own conclusions based on what they hear, whereas in American production, every single act is commented on and explained by the narrator: “For example, Norwegian producers would spend all of their documentary on location with a whale and with the sound. There might be four minutes of whale sounds in the final documentary without anyone telling you what you should think of. However, American production is often more IN YOUR FACE RADIO” (OH McIntyre 2019). With these words, McIntyre insinuates the need to keep listeners informed, at all times, about what exactly is happening and even what to think about the matter at hand.

In American production, it is possible to observe differences among programmes intended for commercial radio stations, podcasts, and pieces created for public radio. Commercial stations’ fear of being turned off by listeners often involves creators resorting to simple solutions that are attractive to listeners but that do not use the entire scope of options provided by the process of creating a feature. Unfortunately, because commercial stations prevail in the U.S., fewer artistic programmes are created. Many qualified feature makers turn to podcast production and abandon multilayered storytelling.

Although the prominent role of a narrator contradicts the approach of Peter Leonhard Braun (the feature as the “acoustic film”), historically, it has not been a negative thing. Creators, many times even independent ones, resort to such approaches that the audience demands. It is quite common for American documentary makers to elevate the role of the narrator to an artistic medium and look for new ways of communicating with the audience by way of a main voice or a dialogue. The British documentary maker Laurence Grissell suggested, “Also pieces which are very script heavy, can be incredibly compelling and have a great sense of a narrative to it” (OH Grissell 2019).

It is necessary to say that, regarding general globalisation, the boundaries among creative styles of the individual countries and continents slowly blur, the creators inspire each other, and the global production of different origins starts to resemble one another in many aspects. The Irish documentary maker Liam O’BrienFootnote 14 offers his view on the matter: “I live in Ireland, Cork. You are from the Czech Republic. We probably watch and listen to maybe 20 or 30% of the same television and radio. Therefore, we’re becoming far more homogenised, far more similar to each other, far more reflective of each other. So, our radio documentaries are going to be more like each other’s. There are fewer unique approaches taken by broadcasters. Obviously, you will have a sense of a piece from the Czech Republic, not just with language. Or you will hear a BBC piece and you will know it is a BBC piece—there are fingerprints of broadcasters and nationalities. But as time goes on, we’re all getting closer. So, there are increasingly fewer diverse ways of telling stories” (OH O’Brien 2019).

The structure of a programme is also affected by whether the creators are employees of a public radio or if they work freelance. Today, there are many more independent audio creators or makers working for both radio and television who simultaneously address their own authorial projects.

According to Julie Shapiro, creating features is popular in Australia, as there has been a long tradition of storytelling, sound art and sound experiments. The sound component of the programmes is, overall, very important to the Australian makers, unlike in the American production or news produced for the BBC World Service, where creators spend only several hours or days editing the final output. The Australian documentary makers reserve a week or even two for sound mixing (Lindgren and McHugh 2013: 107). In the Czech Republic, the final audio mix is also given exceptional care, but one or two weeks in the studio of the Czech Radio just for sound mixing are rather unavailable luxury. On the other hand, it is not uncommon for producers to spend many days or weeks mixing sounds in their home studios (i.e., on their home computers) because they try to get the best sound possible, but the Czech Radio does not have the capacity to accommodate them for this kind of work.

An ideal platform for comfortable listening to international programmes with original sound and English subtitles is the Radio AtlasFootnote 15 website, which partially substitutes for international festivals. It is a place to hear inventive documentaries, dramas and works of sound art that have been made in languages you don’t necessarily speak. However, new programmes are not added to it as quickly as they are created globally. The head administrator of the website Eleanor McDowallFootnote 16 primarily uploads programmes that she hears at one of the international festivals.

The Risks of Generalising Conclusions

You can now forget everything you have learnt from the previous subchapter, because now, my aim is to warn against simplifying and generalising conclusions. The narrative of the “national specifics” of the documentary and the feature is sometimes transmitted into the official materials or opinion-journalistic reflections. Of course, it is based on some experience, but as mentioned above, the way how the final programme sounds like depends only on the creator. Therefore, an American producer can decide to use methods from Scandinavia and vice versa.

The creative approaches of the individual countries often differ radically from one another, as each country has been evolving at its own pace, and the documentary production made there is also affected by the political and economic status quo in the given country. During some time periods, the demand for specific topics may increase, e.g., at the peak of the refugee crisis in various European countries, a significant number of programmes about this topic were created, while others were not interested in this issue at all. The fact that festivals host people from different cultural as well as radio backgrounds enables makers to learn about each other’s production and to understand what fellow creators from other countries find important and why. It offers unique insight into the topics and approaches that are employed in the field that specific year. The different methods of editing vary from one country to the next, among others, due to the technological and financial means available, various cultural traditions or methods of storytelling. Each topic requires a different approach. It is thus very enriching to hear different theories of editing, recording methods, using music or the dramatic structure of the documentary.

It is also necessary to mention that at international events, some countries are represented solely by creators who make a personal appearance, and many times, they concern the same people one year after another. Hence, the international perspective on the production of a given country may be distorted by the production of single specific makers. For example, let me list a situation that arose at the Prix Europa festival in 2019: the Czech documentary maker Martina Pouchlá formulated a thesis that, based on a programme she had heard, she thought that Finnish radio production has, for the most part, a form of a monologue or a dialogue and does not discover new possibilities for working with sound in a creative way and that, on the contrary, the makers stick with the traditional methods of storytelling. She gained this notion of Finnish production by listening to a piece called KOMMUNISTIT (The Communists) by the Finnish maker Matti Ripatti. The programme actually is rather minimalist sound wise and on the more literary side; nevertheless, that does not say anything about Finnish production as a whole. On the other hand, I have always associated Finnish production with the personality of Harri Huhtamäki, who, until recently (he retired in 2017), used to represent Finland with his bold and unforgettable sound opuses. I heard Huhtamäki’s production for the first time at the IFC 2015, where he presented his programme called Affects of Old Time. It featured sound scenes created by Huhtamäki’s band HattiBhutam, loosely putting together a story based on Finnish legends. Huhtamäki’s production is characterised by a prominent acoustic quality, verging on ars acustica where the maker examines the possibilities of treating the human voice as a musical instrument; the listener is then provoked by experimenting with sounds as well as unexpected cuts. My reflection on Finnish production thus differs radically from Pouchlá’s reflection thereon and solely because we have encountered different productions by different creators from a single country. Hence, it is crucial not to generalise any newly gained knowledge and to draw conclusions about the productions of the individual countries based on a broader sample of programmes.

Working with Sound

Sound is the bearer of the dramatic effect, and how to work with it is one of the main topics of discussions at any of the international festivals. Also, as described in the previous subchapter, every maker works with the sound in a different way and has his or her own handwriting. An incredibly detailed discussion about a specific sound effect or an analysis of the “sound atmosphere” distinguishes audio festivals from the rest of such events; nowhere else are these topics provided with such close attention.

Sound adds its magic to a final piece. Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer pointed out that “hearing is a way of touching at a distance”. This statement is based on an actual calculation that proves that at low frequencies (approximately 20 Hertz), audible sound allows people to feel vibrations (McHugh 2022: 64).

The human brain uses what we hear to create a connection with our sound memory, based on which we associate what we hear with concrete memories. Sounds allow us to construct our own world into which we can draw the listener.

The cornerstone of documentary production consists of interviews, and undeniably, without words, radio would be highly disadvantaged and incomprehensible. Simultaneously, it must be said that without background sounds, reportage sounds and music, it would be lacking depth and credibility, and listeners would have nothing to “latch onto” (Chignell 2009: 72). Not only as radio audiences but also as people, we do not possess the ability to listen with full and unadulterated attention to everything that happens around us. Concentrating on listening to the audio production and the soundscape thereof teach us to do so—to notice the beauty of sound and its diversity (Kožík 1940: 94).

As early as 1982, in his essay on the eighth edition of the IFC, the Canadian author Don Mowatt criticised insufficient work with sound material. He declared that too much time in features is devoted to monotonous statements by experts on a given topic, which is a bad habit shared by many creators even today. When the makers want to present facts in their documentary or feature, often interrogating an expert in the field seems to be the easiest way. The result of this practice is that programmes are rich in information but lack emotion and stories. Don Mowatt went on to claim that in 1982, the opposite extreme, i.e., questioning random passers-by, was also very prevalent. This has also appeared in features and documentaries to this day—when the creators want to record the state of general awareness about a topic, they set off into the streets and question a woman walking her dog, an ice cream seller, or a tobacconist. According to Mowatt, however, emphasis should be placed on the protagonists of the piece who have lived through the discussed topic. The recording process should take place in the natural environment or at places close to their heart. Mowatt encouraged the radio creators saying that “[f]ar from intending that we all produce in 16 tracks with layers of clever mixing, I am suggesting that we roll up our sleeves, get out of the studio environment and into the locations where life is being lived” (Mowatt 1982). This quotation implies that the documentary production of the time was still not fully taken out of the studio or into the open air—except for surveys that were supposed to substitute action.

Of course, some programmes do not require the use of sound scenes recorded in the field, for example, when they are contemplative or experimental or when they are based mostly on the part of the narrator, who assesses an event in retrospect. In documentaries, scenes often spice up the whole piece, something to lure listeners and attract their attention. Edwin Brys recommends to the creators not to make the programme “about” a topic but rather immerse themselves fully into it, becoming a part of it. Therefore, they would also have a better chance to record sound scenes. It is also well known that when an action speaks louder than words, documentary makers should thus be present when there is something going on rather than just talk about it afterwards. Sounds and scenes constitute an efficient shortcut—they should not, however, be of a merely illustrative character but also include a message that has meaning.Footnote 17 At the same time, the truth is that the scenes do not happen on their own: the documentary makers thus should not wait for “something happen” but actively seek the action or even initiate it, in some cases.

The most engaging stories are those that are narrated as a sequence of “scenes”, actions, and activities (Abel 2015: 19). According to the American documentary maker Joe Richman, scenes are the fundamental building material for a good story (Abel 2015: 15). In his book ABC lovce zvuku (The Basics of Sound Hunting), Zdeněk Bouček claims that if the creators wish to achieve a dramatic character of the programme, it may be done through working with sound, ideally with the help of several different methods. The first is the method of sharp editing, in which a scene follows another scene without any introduction; alternatively, the contrast method, in which contradicting opinions, facts, pieces of information, etc., are arranged in a row, i.e., one after another. However, Bouček points out the importance of accelerating or slowing down the pace of the programme as well as of the plot of the story, working with pauses and silence, switching between tense and calm passages, and using music, distinguishing between different spaces used for recording through sound or repeating important passages as a refrain (Bouček and Rottenberg 1974: 180).

It is necessary to bear in mind that a sound taken out of context loses its informative power. In their workshop held at Prix Bohemia Radio 2006, Jiří Hraše and Jan Punčochář noted that the sound itself bears no informational value—it is created only after putting the sound into a context. Hraše claims, “I perfected one of my pieces with a sound of leafing through a book, and it sounded exactly the same as skiing down a frozen slope” (Hraše and Punčochář 2006: 32). There is authenticity of the material on the one hand and comprehensibility thereof on the other hand. And as I mentioned above, the makers should always be aware of the context in which the edit was done, since sounds have their unique meaning and “no sound is innocent” (Biewen and Dilworth 2010: 98).

While creating new as well as classical formats, one should be aware of what Bill Bunbury describes as “listenability”. He argues that what he is interested in the most during the creative process is the way the programme is going to sound in the end. Neither does he aim at creating a piece of journalism nor l’art pour l’art (art for art’s sake). He wants the way of conveying information to be efficient and for listeners to be able and willing to accept the information. Put simply, a story must be narrated in an easily digestible form (Lindgren and McHugh 2013: 106).

At the IFC and other festivals, discussions are not only about whether scenes should be recorded or in what order they should be arranged; the creators also address the technical quality of the recorded interviews and materials and share their know-how with each other. It is no exception that the creators compliment each other on the quality of the recorded material or express their dissatisfaction over the fact that some of the interviews were not recorded in sufficient detail. Amplifying the material to sound “close” can be done, to an extent, during postproduction; nevertheless, the result will never be the same as when the material is recorded right away. The creator pushes the microphone as close to the interviewees’ mouth as possible, yet at the same time, in such a way that it does not bother or disturb them. The microphone should not be directed right opposite the mouth since it would capture the aspiration typical for consonants such as b, p or t or various rustles. The creators may avoid this if they direct the microphone slightly from the side or from under the mouth. The closer the microphone is to the interviewee’s mouth, the richer the sound and, simultaneously, the less the echo of the voice in the room. If the voice is off the microphone, it will sound not only distant in the space, but also in emotions.

Recording an interview may seem like a mundane activity—you simply direct the microphone onto an interviewee and press the “red button”. In reality, this process is much more complex. At first, one should know the equipment which he or she is using—how play or pause, how to change the volume, how it works from which angle… There are various sizes of shots (close-up, semi close up, long shot), turning the volume up also applies to the background noise; moreover, a voice recorded from a distance and subsequently turned up in volume has different characteristics than when recorded from a close-up. Volume is a different aspect than closeness. An interview should be recorded in a calm environment without any music playing in the background or any major background noise; the documentary makers may thus avert problems that they would most likely be facing during postproduction. If there is any music or TV playing in the recording, the material is subsequently very hard to edit; the creators are limited by the fact that they cannot cut according to what they find interesting in the utterance but based on the rhythm of the background music or even the song lyrics.

The environment in which the documentary is recorded should correspond with the topic of the interview. And in general, for a long interview which serves later as “the body” of the programme, a sound-neutral setting is vital. Every sound recorded is “baked” into the interview—of course, some can be removed during postproduction, but not every of them, and not reliably. Before the interview or at the end of it, it is ideal to also record one or two minutes of background noise (without any words) in which the interview took place. This material subsequently comes in handy in postproduction. And also, one should remember, that there is “good” noise and “bad” noise. Good noise can be the sound of a river at distance or a bird singing outside the window. Bad noise includes strong wind, kids screaming across the street, trucks passing the highway. You can’t rid of them, and they just infect the recording. Headphones are also an integral part of the recording process, and documentary makers should always have them on their head to be able to control the volume of the interview as well as any potential sound defects. While posing questions, the creators should direct the microphone at themselves; otherwise, their questions would differ in terms of sound quality from the interviewees’ answers—quiet and as if recorded “from a distance”. This could constitute a problem in the case that the maker wants to use them in the final cut of the programme.

All these topics are very palpably present at discussion sessions at audio festivals and conferences. Creators give each other specific tips and recommendations; sometimes, they literally demonstrate, with a recorder in their hand, how they record and what they pay attention to. All this experience is enormously valuable and practical; however, at the same time, it is difficult to replicate in a publishable form, be it in a book or even in a magazine. This is also the reason why the international gatherings of creators are so popular and frequented as it is possible to discuss there in great detail and even to demonstrate hands-on such aspects of production that are difficult to learn from a book or a computer display.

Use of Music

Music is one of the most fundamental media used in audio production and is an integral part of documentary production. While discussing aspects of documentary production, it is almost always reflected. Music is the bearer of emotions that are far from being identical for all listeners. If, thus, the makers do not match the specific’s listener’s music taste, using music can become counterproductive. The listeners would reject the emotion or emphasis presented by the programme and become indifferent towards the message of the entire piece. It is difficult, in these debates, to overcome the basic premise of whether the programme was liked or not; using music and the overall impression of the soundtrack are truly individual criteria for perceiving and evaluating programmes.

Even without using any musical instrument and without recording a single tone, the radio documentary, on its own, constitutes a musical composition. The timbre of the voice, laughter, different accents, variation in the pace of speech of the individual speakers, emotion reflected in the voice, sounds from outside, birds singing or a hum of a refrigerator, rhythmical cuts in the material, polyphony of several overlapping soundtracks, silence—all of that is a part of an enormous composition which the author has to create (Brys 2003: 7). Once, for instance, the programme loses its pace, the listeners lose interest. For me personally, to compose a documentary is a process identical to composing a song; the programme must include a strong introduction, a catchy tune (i.e., the topic that sparks the audience’s interest), intrusive refrain (a repeated notice of the problem that is being dealt with) and a striking finale (the catharsis or moral of the story). All the above may be achieved without employing any musical instruments, using only sophisticated editing and mixing of the material.

Of course, documentary production does work with music per se. However, the documentary makers should consider being economical to be the main objective—how can the greatest possible result be achieved with as few means as possible (Brys 2003: 7)?

Overall, the music in a documentary programme should not be intrusive; in contrast, it should complement the topic. It may “comment” on the plot and enhance the atmosphere; it may serve as an independent character, work as a sort of punctuation to stress and underline information and enable the listeners to relax and give them the space to process the information. It can stimulate imagination or evoke emotions; nevertheless, it definitely should not force them upon the listeners (Biewen and Dilworth 2010: 52). In her book, Out on the Wire, Jessica Abel states that music should constitute the frame around the metaphorical painting. With the apt usage of music, the interviewees’ testimony may seem even more interesting, more heroic or moving than it would without using any music at all (Abel 2015: 34).

The absence of music also plays a role since it may serve the same purpose as the music itself. If the statement is underscored by music that suddenly stops playing, listeners’ attention usually increases, and the pause in the music serves as a raised index finger: “Listen, something is about to happen!” Music also works as a dynamic element. Do you remember action music accompanying car chases in films? If the appropriate music is selected to accompany the scenes, the car is suddenly speeding, and the person who is being chased suddenly runs much faster.

The rule remains that music is the bearer of emotions, which is precisely the reason why it should be used sparingly. It often conveys emotions that are not expressible through words; it grants an aura of validity and significance to a word. It works as a shortcut, as the upwards and downwards movement of the curtain in the theatre Music is the colour of the radio (Kožík 1940: 86). When it is used to underline the spoken word, music should contain no singing. If it includes a singing voice, the words of the lyrics would overpower the spoken word of the programme. Unfortunately, because music has the ability to evoke emotions in listeners’ minds, many creators abuse it: if they feel that they have weak material in their hands that would not elicit the intended effect, it is music that they strive to evoke the emotions with. It thus often occurs that programmes with a weak overall message yet a strong music soundtrack are created, many times very epic and full of pathos. However, beautiful packaging cannot save weak content (Brys 2003: 8).

Personally, while creating radio documentaries, I primarily use music performed by the interviewees themselves. This approach gives the programme a greater degree of authenticity and draws listeners closer to the story. Quite frequently, I recorded the music myself or with my fellow musicians—that way I averted copying other people’s music or having to endure a tedious selection process of the music that would match the purpose. Simply put, we created suitable music and often enriched it with sounds from the documentary itself (e.g., when working on the series on conspiracy theories, fake news, and chain e-mails, I incorporated, into the music, sounds of typing on a computer keyboard; while making a documentary on the state of health care in the Czech Republic, the music included sounds of medical machines used in hospitals). Furthermore, I do not agree with the faking atmosphere using music, which evokes emotions when there is no substantial reason for it. If it occurs that I work with “external” music, I always make sure that it does not feel intrusive. The pace of the music should correspond with the pace of the spoken word that is accompanied by it. An odd impression is created if a slow speech is matched with fast-paced music and vice versa. Moreover, when the music is too overpowering, it may drown out the utterance itself. Sometimes, the juxtaposition of the mood of the music and the spoken word may work well—for example, when you underline an angry and fierce testimony with a melancholic tune. Simultaneously, it is not considered appropriate to use well-known melodies from films or popular scenes since listeners associate them automatically with the original piece of art, which may evoke unintended connotations (of course, it is alright if it corresponds with the authorial intent).

As mentioned above, even the absence of music has a proper role, and by that I do not only necessarily mean silence but also background noise, both of which are not music in the primary sense of the word but could be used as such. Most things around us emit some kind of sound. The world around us has its own sound environment, i.e., soundscape, which we hear every day and are already used to. These sounds (for example, the sound of an iron steaming, a dog barking, a cigarette being lighted, the sounds of carrots being cut on a cutting board, steps in the snow) reproduced in the programme not only affect the listeners’ imagination but also may be used, in good taste, as a rhythmical element by the creator; alternatively, they may already contain a rhythm or a melody in themselves and thus might replace piano sonatas or buzzing string pieces.

In 1993, the Finnish creator Kirsi Häkkinen recorded a mini documentary called Clean Sweep consisting solely of cleaning sounds. These were put into rhythm and composed together in such a way that the final cut resembled a song. Another example is a programme by the Canadian author Adam Goddard called The Change in Farming (1998). Goddard recorded an interview with his grandfather about farming and subsequently edited the grandfather’s words as lyrics of a song that he composed. He based his practice on the grandfather having spoken with various rhythms and richly varied intonation. The melody of the grandfather’s words inspired Goddard to create the final edit.

Each documentary works, in one way or another, with music or with the lack thereof. This topic is discussed on a regular basis at radio festivals: has the maker selected an appropriate music soundtrack, or should he or she have opted for silence? Have they utilised the sound potential of the work to a sufficient degree? Was the music that they used captivating, and did it appeal to the listeners’ emotions? Was it too loud or too quiet? Being a maker myself, I know that employing music evokes many questions in the creator’s mind, which have a significant impact on the postproduction process as well as the final cut of the programme. I can still remember, vividly, a workshop called Music and Storytelling, which was hosted by the Polish multiple Oscars-winning composer Jan Andrzej Paweł Kaczmarek in 2015 at the IFC Lublin, Poland. Kaczmarek claims that music is a natural manifestation of humanity: it is through music that we communicate with each other that it stimulates us emotionally. Using music allows people to better interconnect mutually, and the truth may be revealed while, at the same time, they can manipulate each other—identically to the way in which they manipulate audio storytelling. Each note might alter not only a person’s behaviour but also the overall message of the entire programme. It is thus necessary to consider using any music carefully in advance. In his lecture called Melomania: The Use of Music in Features, Edwin Brys delivered a valuable lesson on music. Brys deals with all aspects of using music: he provides recommendations on what kind of music to use in what situations, how to utilise the absence of music, which music is not appropriate for radio documentaries, how using music may affect the dynamics of the entire piece and what the function of music actually is or to what extent the tradition of using specific melodies and styles has evolved throughout history. Brys put his knowledge down into a very informationally rich text that was published even in the Czech translation in the magazine Svět rozhlasu (The World of Radio) as Melománie – O rysech hudby (Melomania – On the Features of Music) (Brys 2003: 8).

Dubbing and Voice-Over

If the potential audience of the target language is small, interpreting, translating, or using dubbing/voice-over cannot be avoided. Whenever the makers take the programme to an international festival, they have to accompany it with English (or any other language, depending on the target audience) subtitles. Sometimes, it may occur that we record foreign interviewees whose testimonies we want to convey to “our” listeners—but what is the best way to do so?

A voice-over may interfere with the atmosphere of the programme, disturb the intimacy of a particular scene, or seem ridiculous. According to Edwin Brys, it is crucial to give listeners a chance to hear the original language: the audience must be aware of where we are and with whom, and language is one of the best means for distinguishing a location. Language helps create the background of an event, adds a flavour in the form of the atmosphere of the location, and brings musicality inherent to all languages but to each in a different way. Simultaneously, if we conduct an interview with someone, we pay them a certain kind of respect; thus, in the final cut, their speech should not be fully suppressed in favour of the voice-over (Brys 2001, b: 23).

If the programme includes utterances delivered in a foreign language without any voice-over, the makers often face the question of how much space they should devote to them. Should the original utterances be preserved “under” the dubbed voice-over for the entire time or is it better to delete them and keep only the voice-over in the final cut of the programme? Or, in the case of any of the widely known languages such as English, German, or French, leave the text without any translation whatsoever? Do we count on an educated audience who will surely understand these languages?

Apparently, there are no definite answers to these questions, as approaches keep changing and language skills are much more prevalent today than they were just several decades ago. It is always necessary, however, to balance the ratio of dubbing to the original sound well so that the actors’ voices correspond to the characteristics of the voices that are being dubbed and the way of speech of both the original voice as well as the dubbed one is paid attention to. For instance, if the original utterance is delivered in slang, it is vital to bear in mind that it should be dubbed with adequate equivalence. At the same time, imitating the original is not a good idea in this sense. This might result in pathos and artificialness (Brys 2001, b: 24).

In his text Translating for Radio (2001), Edwin Brys ponders over what the language of the original material attests to. According to Brys, an interviewee’s statement delivered in the original language conveys authenticity, which is highly valuable for the documentary. For example, if we record an interview with a victim of the Chernobyl catastrophe or an inhabitant of a small South African town that is riddled with gang gunfights daily, we want to hear the stories and the narration first-hand. Each story bears its own significance, regardless of the language used. The listeners need to hear the main protagonists. This is also associated with the work’s emotional content: if the interviewees are emotionally invested in the topic, their voice expression is loaded with meaning and universally comprehensible. The listeners will understand it irrespective of the language. Anger, resignation, calm, panic, tenderness, and happiness are emotions that the voice expresses unambiguously regardless of whether we understand the words uttered.

Some words do not need to be dubbed, strictly, as they are understood internationally, and listeners are able to distinguish them despite not speaking the language. These include, for instance: bomb, cocaine, fascist, hurricane, partisan, diamond, terrorist, hamburger and so on.

What is absolutely crucial for a documentary, but often very difficult (and pointless) to dub, are the scenes, the particular action and the reportage records of what is happening here and now. They are interesting for the content as well as the drama included therein, as they attest to particular events and conflicts. It does not matter that they occur in a foreign language since, in addition to emotions, they inherently bear meaning within themselves.

If we record a publicly well-known personality who may be considered a certain authority, it is also a good idea to let his or her voice be heard and not try to dub the entire utterance. Listeners need to recognise speakers and realise their significance (Brys 2001, b: 23).

Brys states other tips and recommendations for the ways to work with dubbing and foreign-language material. Voice-over should not be heard throughout the entire programme, as it could result in a very monotonous piece. Simultaneously, there is no need for literal translation, and the original material should be heard intermittently among the voice-overs.

For me personally, working with dubbed voice-over is, in a way, similar to working with music. Like with music, voice-over should not overpower or overwhelm, and it should be used in good taste, melodically and rhythmically; most importantly, all that while bearing in mind that less is sometimes more. Personally, I dealt with the matter of dubbed voice-over the most in my programmes Hudba v dřevě zakletá (Music Enchanted into Wood) a Překročit hranice (Crossing Borders).

Based on hearing my feature Matěj at the IFC 2017 in Stockholm (organised by Sveriges RadioFootnote 18), the American creator Dennis FunkFootnote 19 approached me. Funk, who speaks no Czech, only English, wanted to make a documentary about the Czech xylophone player Bena Havlů.Footnote 20 He was aware of his limited language skills and did not know how to speak to the 79-year-old musician, as she, on the other hand, did not speak a word in English. After hearing Matěj, Funk contacted me with a request to help him interpret and record the programme. The cooperation did happen, in the end. Funk flew from Chicago to the Czech Republic for a weekend, and together, we started recording material about the talented xylophone player. This was the first Czech American cooperation of this kind in history. In the end, I created a documentary called Hudba v dřevě zakletá (Music Charmed into Wood)Footnote 21 (2019) from the recorded material. However, I was struggling intensely with the translation not only during the postproduction process but also during the recording process itself. Even though Dennis Funk did not speak a word of Czech, it was him who led the whole recording process—he posed questions, he held the microphone, he recorded everything meticulously, and the entire project was his idea. I served as an interpreter in the whole process. I interpreted Funk’s questions into Czech for Bena Havlů and then translated her answers back to English for Funk. This resulted in the recording process being significantly slow—the amount of the interviews expanded to double the length as opposed to how long they would have been if they were conducted in a single language. For Funk to understand the recorded material, it was necessary to transcribe it into a computer (together with notes about the exact timing of each utterance), after which the material was translated in a precise manner. The original idea was that Funk would edit, out of the translated material, his own documentary in which he would work with English as well as Czech which he does not understand but has the literal translation of at his disposal. In the end, for time reasons, I ended up editing a documentary in the Czech language for the Czech audience; however, some English does appear in my programme, as does several openly admitted moments when Bena Havlů and Dennis Funk cannot understand each other. These moments are brief, concise, and universally comprehensible since their tones of voice clearly convey that they do not understand what the other person is saying. Simultaneously, the abovementioned scenes slow down the pace of the programme, embellish the atmosphere of the recording process and bear significant testimony.

My documentary Překročit hranice (Crossing borders) from 2016 deals with several days in October 2015 when the refugee crisis was escalating. In the Czech Republic, everyone seemed to have very radical opinions about the crisis and people could get in fights as everyone was claiming “the truth” about the refugee situation. I was trying not to get involved as I did not want to get into conflict with my loved ones. Also, I knew, that the situation is not very transparent—on the one hand, Europe was struggling with the crowds of refugees, on the other hand, they needed the place to go to save their lives. I avoided the articles on the internet about the topic for so long that in the end, I decided to travel to the border crossing Bapska/Berkasovo between Croatia and Serbia and learn the truth on the spot. For the programme, I had recorded many interviews with refugees directly at the border between Croatia and Serbia. All were conducted in English, sometimes very broken. The fact that the English spoken by the refugees was not perfect actually proved to be an advantage—the simpler the words used by the interviewees were, the more I was allowed to let the original sound be heard in the programme. Basic English was potentially understandable even for listeners who did not have a full command of the language. Moreover, there were essential emotions present in the statements of my interviewees that penetrated their words. The people concerned had been forced to abandon their homes and escape the war; in most cases, they had lost everything. All of that could have been heard in their testimonies; that was why I always let a part of the original dialogue be heard and only added the dubbed voice-over subsequently. I made sure to use that in small doses, however, and under the voice-over, the original dialogue was always heard. Sometimes the voice-over was interrupted so that the listeners could hear directly solely the main interviewee in an emotionally loaded moment. The bilingual scenes and interviews that I used helped the audience empathise with the situations and learn in greater detail about the environment and conditions in which the recording process had taken place.

The Authorial Approach and the Dramatic Structure

When we hear a good story, we sometimes tend to claim that “this story tells itself”. Unfortunately, that is a nonsense. Stories never tell themselves; there is always a person who creates and tells them. But of course, for a producer, it is a compliment to hear. Very often, when it sounds “easy and light”, the process of creating is difficult and complicated. However, this is proof that a good technique was used while editing—structure counts. When telling a story, producers must decide when the best time is for the listener to find out some facts. Where in the story are the places when the listener feels strong emotions? Where are the parts where the listener will realise something?

A photograph of a person stands on the left of the display board. The display board displays the title documental structure, and the subheadings are signature, first scene, backstory, main story, reason, and end.

The workshop about building a good structure of an audio documentary, IFC 2017, Stockholm (Source: archive of the IFC)

In the process of creating an authorial documentary, it is natural that the makers’ opinion bears the highest significance, as it is the maker who records the material, edits it, composes the final structure of the programme, and usually also serve as the director. It is them and their unique signature style that creates the feature. The makers should have to hold the reins firmly in their hands and give the programmes their content, character, and significance. It is the authors’ thoughts that make up the framework into which the original sounds and elements are inserted, not vice versa. As the Czech documentary maker and creative editor Daniel Moravec claims, “In the first place, the creators mustn’t be afraid of themselves. They should not impose any limitations on themselves, and they have to experiment. Even at a price of making mistakes” (Ješutová 2013: 134).

It is always a matter of how much space of the documentary is allotted, by the maker, to the interviewees and how much of it is in fact left to the creators themselves and for what reason. The trend of strengthening the role of the maker when creating features is evident not only in Czech feature production but also worldwide. The multimedia environment and the broad availability of recording devices provided lay, nonprofessional makers with a space where they may share their personal stories. In this sense, the feature has evolved over the past twenty years, mainly on the American continent (Hanáčková 2012: 117). It is not easy to judge whether or not it is egotistical or appropriate to deal with one’s own problems while creating a feature; however, we would find “ego-documentaries” or “documentary therapies” in the archives of any radio station. It could also be labelled gonzo journalism, which is a style of journalism written without claims of objectivity, and very often based on the reporter’s first-person narrative. Nevertheless, as early as 2001, at the meeting of the SOS feature, which I address in the chapter of the same name, Edwin Brys criticised the excessive numbers of documentaries with the selection of topics inspired by selfish reasons (Brys 2001, b). According to Brys, at the time, the makers gave preference to their own problems before the contemporary existential and societal issues. Although these personal problems may refer to a broader social matter, sometimes it is difficult to determine the boundary between what might listeners still find interesting and what is there purely for the sake of the creators themselves. In Brys’s view, the maker of the documentary should, first and foremost, create it with the listener in mind. Personally, I agree with this perspective, as programmes are made primarily for the audience. I am definitely not trying to minimise the selection of personal topics; it is, however, always important to bear in mind that they have to be treated in such a way to appeal to a wider audience—we are all people, and we deal with similar problems in different stages of our lives. Creators should be critical, they should not overestimate their own story, and on the contrary, they should look for a connection to society as a whole. And also, for me, there must be a good reason for saying “I” in the narration—if there isn’t, I don’t do it.

Robert McLeish claims that the creators of the programme should be interested in what the listeners demand, what makes them laugh or cry. The listeners are the most important part of the entire work of a radio maker. Many radio creators agree (and I can confirm from my own experience) that they do what they find fulfilling and enjoyable and that being paid for it is a great bonus, although the amounts of the financial rewards are quite arguable in many respects. There is a kind of symbiosis and friendly atmosphere among radio makers and even double among documentary producers (McLeish and Link 2016: 26). A duo of documentary makers, Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva alias Kitchen Sisters, ponder over the fact that even though the work of a documentary maker is extremely inspiring and “charging”, it unfortunately includes tens of lonely hours that are spent travelling to meet the interviewees, recording and finally listening to all of the recorded material that will never be heard by anyone else but the creators themselves, searching for the best sentences and sounds, cutting and editing thereof, writing topic proposals, grant proposals, dealing with the production as well as the postproduction process; ideally, it is also dealing with promotion and communication on social media. The Kitchen Sisters say, “Let’s face it, the money sucks; you’re not in this work for money (though you deserve it)” (Biewen and Dilworth 2010: 38).

Any decision made by the maker is usually discussed with the creative editor whom the makers consult about their aim. In the Czech Republic, the creative editor is labelled a ‘dramaturg’. The Czech term has a much broader meaning than the English term ‘dramaturge’. In the Czech context, in terms of the radio, TV or basically any medium production, the term could denote a creative editor, script editor, commissioning editor or even an executive producer. It could be said that creative editing is, by definition, a creative process within which various tools are used that lead to the final composition of the piece (Motal 2012: 63). The creative editor for the radio documentary should be aware of the production created by the other makers as well as the popular demand of the time. They should know how to create a good story and motivate the makers to the best possible performance. They should be able to tell the creators which parts of the intended programme work well, which do not, and what material is “extra”. Sometimes it can occur that the creators are emotionally invested and see the material too uncritically. This is the moment when the creative editor should intervene. At the same time, they should not make decisions for the makers since the programme would then cease to be authorial and would become the work of the creative editor. Ideally, a good creative editor should have his or her own creative experience, as frequently, they face an unfinished piece that needs to be completed, either by advice or by an intervention, in cooperation with the maker (Kožík 1940: 164). Daniel Moravec also formulated his own principles of creative editing: “I see the work of the creative editor as the ability to capture the best of the maker as everyone is different and as such has a different approach to work. That’s why I don’t want to be directive but rather serve as some kind of coach. The creators must be able to defend their vision, and then I would see no reason not to fulfil it in their own way. I refuse to think that I have the best ideas and that I know what people want to hear. That is pride and that never leads to good results” (Ješutová 2013: 135). I also address this topic in a section “The IFC Discussions and Their Changes over Time” in Chap. 8.

The cooperation of makers with creative editors is often a sparkling topic that inspires many emotions. At the end of the day, the main job lies on the makers themselves, as it is them who are recording the tape; it is them who pose the questions and communicate with the interviewees. Simultaneously, the makers are also the ones who should be able to react promptly to the stimuli generated by the interviewees—be able to improvise despite arriving at the recording session prepared. The Swedish creator, filmmaker, and Professor Bengt BokFootnote 22 pondered, “Do I have the courage to remain humble and to ask unexpected questions on the basis of my intuition and curiosity? Do I have the courage to listen critically to the responses given… and to my own questions? […] The interviewees can then feel that they are being taken seriously and are actively participating in the interview—which is something that we are doing together even though, as the interviewer, I am the responsible party” (Bok 2015: 16).

At the same time, the interviewer should not be afraid to lead the interviewee out of the comfort zone. People talk about the topics that they know really close; thus, they often have practised some of the answers beforehand. These might, however, seem boring, uninteresting, or even dishonest in the documentary. Let us try to bring the interviewees into new, surprising situations and ask unexpected questions, we will often be surprised what kind of a result it might yield (Biewen and Dilworth 2010: 180). For reading about interviewing, I would recommend the book Encounter with the Other: Some Reflections on Interviewing by the Swedish creator and theoretician Bengt Bok or Out on The Wire: The Storytelling Secrets of the New Masters of Radio by Jessica Abel.

While editing the material, you should bear in mind whether you are interested in various parts of it or if you find the material slow and boring. If the creators themselves conclude that some passages cannot even keep their attention, they should eliminate them from the final cut, shorten them or replace them with different materials. They themselves are their test audience, and they should abide by the impression that the material has on them. If they do not enjoy it, the audience will not enjoy it either.

While creating the programme, to ask oneself, “So what?” is fundamental. If you decide to tell a story, what new can it bring to the listener? Why should the audience be interested in the piece? How does your approach differ from that of hundreds of other makers? What makes your documentary unique and memorable is the ability to develop new and unconventional ideas. Even though I present several different rules of the programme composition, the main rule still remains that there are no rules—all depend on the authorial approach.

This is also the reason why it is no exception that the international festivals and competitions are attended by the makers as well as the executive or creative producers or the creative editors. Let us not forget that festivals also have their “industry” zones, places where these producers exchange key information and arrange general options for any cooperation or coproduction, where initial inspiration for international projects emerges. The festivals and competitions covered in this book usually constitute key places of gatherings not only for the makers themselves but also for the creative editors and producers, be they independent companies or publicly owned media.

Topic Selection and the Narrative Method

In the previous chapters, I have, many times, emphasised the notions of narration, narrator, authorial narration and storytelling. I have shown the extent to which these concepts are key to the genre of the American podcast; simultaneously, the method of narration is one of the key topics of the discussions, be it within the broadest circles at Prix Europa, as well as the closed meetings of the juries at Prix Italia. At the HearSay as well as the Third Coast festivals, separate workshops dealing with narrative methods are held; discussion circles at the IFC also examine the problem very diligently.

In this day and age, it is very difficult to create something that listeners have not heard yet, as each day, hours and hours of new programmes emerge. Edwin Brys comments on this fact with the words of the Canadian poet Gilles Vigneault: “Everything has been said but not by me” (OH Brys 2017a, b). Although a significant majority of the topics has already been dealt with on radio, each time, there is always room for the original authorial approach, the makers’ own perspective, their creative method, their narration, and their view on a well-known topic.

There is a difference between a topic and a story. While searching for a suitable subject matter for a documentary, it is, in fact, about choosing a story. If we decide to select World War II as the topic, we still do not know exactly what we want to record and why. We must decide what story from WWII we would like to deal with. A simple rule of thumb for the creator is: “I am doing story about X. And what is interesting about it is Y” (Abel 2015: 57). In this context, X is a topic, and Y is a story.

The topic is usually very broad: the entire development of WWII and all stories that took place during it cannot be dealt with fully in a single radio documentary. We have to realise what the main essence of the topic is, choose what to focus on and reduce the complex topic to a single story that resonates with us the most, towards which we feel the most tension. Simultaneously, we have to opt for such a story that the listeners will comprehend, that will interest them and help them understand the topic on a deeper level. The British documentary maker and theoretician Simon Elmes goes even further—in his presentation Dramaturgy and Storytelling, which he had at the Janáček Academy of Performing Arts in Brno, Czech Republic in 2018, he claimed that a good story is not enough, what is important is the plot. A story may be expressed by a single sentence “A man died, and his wife then died, too”. The plot would then be “A man died, and his wife then died of grief”. According to Elmes, when we are thinking about the structure / dramaturgy / storytelling of the programme, we should ask three basic (but important) questions: 1. Where do I start? 2. Where do I end? 3. What happens in between? For the opening of the piece, we are always looking for something that will both tell the listener about our programme (a mood, a character, a quality of intimacy), and catch their attention. We may wish to intrigue them, mystify them even, but not confuse them so that they become so muddled that they don’t understand or even stop listening.

Since features often address moral questions, the IFC also hosts discussion sessions about clichés or moralising utterances by makers or interviewees. Creators definitely should not fulfil the role of the “messiah”, and they should treat human emotions with the utmost care and good taste. Features should serve as a dialogue between the creator and the listener: the creator shows their interpretation of the problem and their perspective, which they are able to support with arguments but should not enforce it on the listener (Karisto 2002). I address the ethical questions in detail in the next section “The Ethics of the Documentary Maker”.

Robert McLeish claims that programmes should talk about anything new, interesting, and authentic. In this context, “new” means whatever the listeners have not yet heard or an update on something they have already heard; “interesting” refers to whatever is relevant or what directly affects the audience;Footnote 23 and “authentic” is what is based on facts (McLeish and Link 2016: 79).

According to Edwin Brys, in a good documentary, characters should always strive to resolve something, to come to terms with something, to unravel something—a good story cannot do without a mishap the solution of which is awaited by the listener in suspense: “Not those who want and can get, rather those who want and can’t get, or those who can get but don’t want” (OH Brys 2017a, b). A programme should always include some kind of tension between a dream and a deed, a reality and an expectation, an achievement and a loss, a specific person and their relationship to the society, the minority and the majority, the old and the new, something that is regular and something that is, in some way, exceptional (OH Brys 2017a, b). Jessica Abel lists a simple rule that may be used while searching for a story or a plot: “Somebody does something because…, but…” (Abel 2015: 52). The first part of the sentence serves as an introduction to the character, who is the main protagonist/agent of the plot and performs some activity. The “because” signifies the motivation for the character’s activities. “But” means an obstacle that appears and triggers another chain of events. Simon Elmes thinks, that we should also ask ourselves: Can I delay elements in the story to create surprises, reveals or twists? How much does the listener need to know about the characters to care about what happens to them? Does the story contain jeopardy? If not, how can I develop a sense of jeopardy? Building uncertainty of outcome into a programme is a powerful dramatic motor. Remember: you are in control and know all the facts. You can (and should) play with the listener, make him or her "want more”.

Searching for a suitable story for a programme often takes a long time. The American producer Ira Glass assumes, however, that it is fine and offers a metaphor: “If you want to get hit by lightning, you have to wander around in the rain for a while” (Biewen and Dilworth 2010: 65).

In the discussions at the international festivals, the creators touch upon the ethical perspective of the recording process, the relevance of the topic, the relationship between the maker and the interviewee or the selection of the interviewee as such. Storytelling is the most significant component of each programme (OH Brys 2017a, b). The authors’ ability to tell a story in an innovative and unconventional way is often the only thing that keeps the listeners physically next to the radio set, because we need good stories, they bring the world to us. Stories also give us hope that anything is possible—listening to stories from the lives of other people we can discover how them deal with crises and how they overcome them. The narrative method is, to an extent, tightly connected to the authorial approach. In fact, it is up to the creator what kind of narration they opt for, whether they use the narrator’s part or whether they compose the story solely based on sounds and scenes recorded in a documentary way. During this decision process, inevitably, a question is bound to arise: what is primary? The story or the narration? Do we want the evoke, in the listeners’ mind, the idea that the story is happening here and now or that we just present something that has already happened in the past?

It is only through narration that the story is born (which is true not only for fictional narratives but also for nonfiction/documentary narratives); according to Edwin Brys, “[s]tories only happen to those who can tell them” (OH Brys 2017a, b). Nonetheless, the fundamental structures of the story (relationships between characters, plots, motivations) are preexisting before the story itself. The grammatical tense of the narration may evoke an illusion that the story already happened in the past before the very act of the storytelling. The narrative act thus presents the story that already belongs to the past but which, simultaneously, is brought into existence only by the very narrative act (Kubíček et al. 2013: 35).

The classical literary theory offers a basic typology of narration as follows: “The narration may present the story in many different ways: it might honour the primary chronology of the story, i.e., how it really happened, or it may regroup the events of the story, so an event which enters the story in a later stage is anticipated before the event constituting the cause thereof or, vice versa, the event is incorporated in the story retrospectively in order to clarify some connections which were concealed so far” (Kubíček et al. 2013: 34). Furthermore, different genres require different approaches to storytelling, e.g., a detective story often begins with an event (a murder or another criminal act), which is a result of a chain of different events that are going to be reconstructed during the narration. This principle is used to emphasise the matter of “how it occurred” and thus also the role and the character of the detective. On the contrary, should the murder take place at the end of the story, the role, and the character of the victim, or alternatively, those of the murderer (based on the vantage point of the entire narration), are emphasised. These basic rules must be known by the makers of documentary detective stories or true crime programmes or by investigative programmes structured on the basis of the crime genre. This is also the reason why storytelling is the subject of debates held by audio creators.

While traditional narratives preserve the causal and chronological structure of a story, experimental narratives opt to abandon and complicate it. Even though the story is still the fundamental condition of the narration, it is what distinguishes narrative works from lyric pieces, essays, etc. Even these might, naturally, appear in the audio production—contemplative sound images that are not concerned with telling a story but rather with providing the listeners with an experience, evoking emotions, and eliciting feelings.

Even if the maker decides to create a programme without a narrative line and lacking continuous commentary, the recorded material constitutes a way of narration in and by itself, and the recorded material and the cut serve as the narrator. The creators themselves decide the order of the individual scenes as well as who is allowed to speak in the final cut of the programme. The completed piece thus represents not only the creators’ perspective on the given topic but also, simultaneously, their narrative style even if it does not employ any words. The pair of creators from the duo Kitchen Sisters suggests that it is “[a] sort of ventriloquism—we speak through other people and other people speak through us” (Biewen and Dilworth 2010: 10).

Personally, as mentioned above, I strive to complete the programmes without any added narrative line; the main characters remain the narrators as we follow them in real time, experiencing specific situations along with them. When I record someone’s story, it is because I think that the person has something to say and convey to the audience. It is vital to find a strong protagonist who will guide you through the programme. There is thus no reason to interfere with any added commentary. Moreover, I want my interviewees to speak directly to the listeners. Due to this practice, a social dialogue is formed, and the audience is drawn into the story and given a chance to answer questions that may arise during the programme.

If I write a part of a narrator into the script, each of their comments should move the plot forward in one way or another or bring some new information. The American creator, Peabody award-winning radio producer, and educator Scott Carrier assumed that the narrators’ parts in the radio documentaries should serve as the camera lens to ‘show’ the listeners what is taking place in the particular scene (Biewen and Dilworth 2010: 10).

In the chapter dealing with the HearSay festival, I mention the method of recording invented by the Danish creator Torben BrandtFootnote 24 and called The Moment Interview. This method is inspired by the work of Brandt’s fellow creator Stephen Schwartz,Footnote 25 and it relies on a specific way of questioning the interviewee.

It is crucial to mention that with documentary production, decisions about the narrative method, to an extent, are already created while recording basic material. Do the creators wish to make an appearance in the final cut of the programme? Do they wish to employ the narrator or let the interviewee tell the story? If the documentary maker opts to leave the entire storytelling part solely to the interviewee, he or she must pose precisely aimed questions and adjust the interviewee’s testimony in such a way that it works on its own without accompanying commentary. To encourage the interviewee not only to plainly answer the questions but also to tell a story. Using the method of The Moment Interview, the documentary creator makes the interviewee talk in the present tense as if the story was taking place here and now. The method reconstructs even tiny details and thus revives the story once again to capture the “moment”. Stephen Schwartz even recommends laying the interviewees down on the ground or on a couch, having them close their eyes and transfer themselves fully into the situation that they are talking about. Documentary makers should help evoke the situation from the memory with their questions, e.g.: “You are entering the Institute of Anatomy. What can you see? What can you smell? What can you hear? What colour are the walls?” While recording such deep conversations, which are subsequently going to be edited and the questions posed by the interviewer cut out, letting solely the interviewee speak, the interviewer should avoid interjecting with vocal agreements (‘u-huh’), laughter or various audible reactions. These sounds prove hard to eliminate while editing. Instead of encouraging the interviewee with words, it is better to just nod your head and maintain eye contact. Facial expressions and nonverbal communication play important roles overall.

At every audio conference, the opportunity to hear the results of the various approaches is very enriching and enlightening. All kinds of narration share the strong opening, the moment of drawing the listener into the story. The beginning of the programme is often created at the very end of the postproduction process. Only after processing the entire material is the maker able to distinguish the most powerful part, which would motivate the listeners to continue listening to the programme. Some say that the very first minute of the whole piece is the most crucial. Within this short time span, creators must appeal to listeners, introduce the topic that will be dealt with, and describe the problem that will be discussed. A powerful sound image must be created to tease listeners’ imagination (McLeish and Link 2016: 73).

The Ethics of the Documentary Maker

Ethical questions are among the most common questions at prestigious festivals and reflect the international nature of audio documentary gatherings. The approach to various sensitive topics differs from one country to the next, as the societal or rather ethical debate is in very different stages in each of them. Typically, the matters of handicapped people, human rights, religious issues, migration, the state of public health and overall sustainability constitute scopes of topics that are perceived differently in each country and are undergoing a different kind of societal debate; as such, in the context of documentary production circles, a matter of discussion about the ethics of the documentary is supposed to reflect the state of the social as well as the individual perspective on the given topics.

In relation to the phenomenon of true crime series, a discussion is initiated about the ethical principles of documentary production and about the approach taken by the interviewees. What to do when the creators obtain facts, from the interviewees, which may have an impact on the results of a crime investigation? The documentary makers become investigators themselves, even detectives—they search for new information, question witnesses, and get into very close contact with them. At the same time, the documentary maker becomes a confidant. Some of the interviewees may easily reveal a fact that had been concealed until then—solely because they trusted the creator and felt friendly towards him or her. Should documentary makers take this information to the police immediately? Should they keep it to themselves if the interviewee asks them to? Or should they use it as the grand finale for their documentary?

In the Czech Republic, the ground-breaking true crime series was Matematika zločinu (The Mathematics of Crime) from 2019, in which the documentary makers Brit Jensen and Magdalena Sodomková investigated the case of a man who was convicted for murder. The man claims that his conviction was false due to a mistake made by the expert witness. Sodomková and Jensen examined all the available information and discovered new facts while getting in conflicts with the interviewees and in the end even with their own radio station (Matematika zločinu, © 2019).

Robert McLeish defines the basic rules of ethics for journalists in his book Radio Production; in this case, they may also be applied to the work of documentary makers. According to McLeish, journalists should:

  • understand that whatever they publish might unfavourably affect some members of society. They should be particularly careful when they talk about children, in the case of a true crime, bereaved after violent crimes, etc.

  • act cautiously when searching for material or using interviews and photographs of people who were directly affected by some tragedy.

  • be aware that collecting and publishing information may lead to harming somebody or make them uncomfortable. The hunt for the best story is not a licence for arrogance.

  • know that people who are interviewed are entitled to control information that is published about them. Breaching someone’s privacy is possible only with the assumption of the greater good (the information helps the investigation, etc.).

  • prove their good taste—avoid shocking and disgusting information to be published solely for sensationalist purposes.

  • be careful when publishing details about underage suspects or victims of sex crimes.

  • publish only officially verified names or facts concerning the case.

  • put the suspect’s rights on the same level as the right of the public to be informed (McLeish and Link 2016: 67).

Another “moral dilemma” may arise, for instance, when recording with mentally or physically challenged interviewees. How can the material be treated in a sensitive way yet not manipulated? Which material is fit for use in the final cut of the programme, and which should only be left on our computer’s storage space? What effect will the information have on your interviewee when it is published?

Documentary makers often serve as confessors who strive to have interviewees open up to them completely and tell them their stories down to every tiny detail. The confession analogy also works in the sense that in the church, it also happens only orally, the confessor usually does not see the confessing person, only hears them. This theory was confirmed to me also by the Czech documentary maker and Roman Catholic priest Jan Hanák, according to whom the work of a priest and that of a documentary maker bear many similarities. One must be a good listener, he must be in constant touch with people, strive to understand them and spend a lot of time with them. Therefore, they subsequently have a large amount of material at their disposal, which contains intimate and delicate information from the lives of the interviewees or their next of kin. Such information may be crucial for the final cut of the programme, or it can cause an upheaval or evoke emotions, but it might harm or embarrass the interviewees as well as their family and friends. When choosing the material, it is necessary to consider whether or not publishing some of the material could have negative consequences. The documentary makers’ work on the feature should resemble their work with their own conscience. In his book Encounter with the Other: Some Reflections on Interviewing, the radio and film documentary maker, writer, and Professor Bengt Bok ask himself whether “[t]he unspoken—does it always need to be said? Does it in fact say more by remaining unspoken? Does silence—the pauses—tell more than the words? Does the decision not to say something in fact say more than what might actually be said?” (Bok 2015: 15).

I hold the view that what makes a good quality documentary is not what is used out of the material but rather what the makers keep to themselves. If the interviewees open up to the documentary makers to a truly significant extent and reveal various intimate situations out of their lives, the creators should consider whether they will use the details in the final cut of the programme—will such a situation move the story forward and help the programme or is it just going to play with the audience’s emotions, but without deeper reasoning? Many times, it may be much more valuable (and functional) not to publish intimate situations. Ideally, one should have a large amount of material recorded and subsequently choose the most important and the most informationally dense parts.

In 2020, the main prize in the Documentary category of the Czech national competition Prix Bohemia Radio was awarded to Magdaléna Trusinová for her programme Zpověď (Confession). The piece tells the story of a young girl who was molested by a priest. Despite the programme being of a very intimate nature and sending chills down the listeners’ spines, we never actually learn how exactly the abuse happened. Although the protagonist talks about the experience, the details are omitted. During the discussion session at the Prix Bohemia festival, Magdaléna Trusinová claimed that she had recorded an enormous amount of material in which the confessing girl described, in great detail, the course of the abuse as well as other negative experiences. Simultaneously, at the final cut, Trusinová decided not to use these recordings as, while horrifying, they would not move the story any further and would merely shock and disgust the audience. The creator never even stated the name of the molested girl, nor of the priest or anyone else. This information is not vital for the main moral of the story—i.e., a testimony about the fact that guilt is often felt solely by the victims of someone else’s evil deeds and that forgiveness is not given freely as much as is demanded (PRIX BOHEMIA, © 2020). Of course, if Trusinová had wanted to make a programme based on a criminal investigation and the subsequent confrontation of the highly ranked clergy, she would have, most likely, opted for yet a slightly different approach. That was not her point, however. Her aim was to tell a story and help listeners understand the mental processes of a particular person as well as her life story. It is highly probable that while presenting such a programme in front of an international audience, voices would rise and demand an investigative approach potentially leading to the perpetrator’s punishment. In many countries, the debate about child molestation in the church is at a much-advanced level, and a mere “testimony” is considered weak and lacking. In contrast, there are countries in Europe where the confession itself may be seen as a very progressive piece of audio, and it might even be problematic to have it broadcasted by a public radio station. This aspect has always been very interesting and controversial during discussions with international circles.

The truth, however, is that each maker has his or her own approach and that each country has its own tradition. As Andrea Hanáčková says in her essay “Vienna Feature Medley”, which was dedicated to the Vienna edition of the IFC in 2006, “What the BBC would never play, the liberal Dutch freely allow in the broadcast” (Hanáčková 2006: 4).

For the creator of the programme, it might often be difficult to avoid being carried away by the “sensation” of the recorded material. And some documentaries are recorded just for the effect. We can say that sometimes documentary makers use the pain of the interviewee just for the entertainment of their audience, sometimes even for their own. A good documentary maker can be identified based on knowing what is truly important for the programme and not just for a mere shock value. Additionally, their interviewees can trust them and are not afraid to describe even the darkest or most compromising aspects of their story—they can rely on the creators not abusing the information.

Siobhán McHugh composed these four simple rules: one should not edit in a way that misrepresents the interviewee’s views, as this would be a serious violation of an unwritten agreement between the interviewee and the documentary maker. Also, the interviewee should be aware of the programme’s focus. If the person does not want to give you an interview, you shouldn’t make him or her. And finally, do not cherry-pick evidence and thereby distort the truth (McHugh 2022: 155).

While working with the interviewees as well as with the recorded material, documentary makers should always listen to their own conscience, and whenever they are in doubt, they should ponder over the potential consequences of each edit they carry out within the programme. I am not suggesting avoiding controversy at all costs or being afraid of stepping out of line. Rather, to be aware of the enormous trust that each interviewee puts in the hand of the documentary maker. No edit is innocent. The context may even change the outcome of very clear and direct information. And we, the documentary makers, are here to tell the stories of other people, not to feed on them.

Conclusion

In the partial conclusion of the notes concerning the topics of the discussions at various international festivals and competitions, I would take the liberty to summarise that the debates are actually inspired by the individual aspects of the documentaries and often go into great depth. Together, we talk not only about the programme itself, about the narration thereof, about the sound aspect, the music and silence but also about a number of other circumstances of the recording process and postproduction. The makers describe the contexts of their home radio stations or the private independent production companies. When necessary, they explain the broader social narrative of the specific topic of the specific programme. Discussions dealing with ethics and the moral stance of creators are always very lively. And frequently, details of a technical nature are discussed, as are what type of microphone the creators used, what software they used to edit the programme, and how many people were involved in the work of the creative team.

All of these findings clearly show that the feature continuously keeps evolving—and even though some of the issues have been solved, new ones keep arising every day. An increasing number of young people discover the beauty of documentary production, and the faces of the participants at the festivals continue to change as well, although they can still meet the old hands of the global feature.