Fitting everything in
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Transcript
- Wellington High School student
- How did you go about condensing two decades into one single episode? Which bits did you have to cut out or keep in?
- Vincent Burke
-
Our brief was to make the definitive history of New Zealand in 13 hours, or 13 television hours, which isn’t even… 50 minutes in fact in our case. So it’s been a process of refinement right from day one.
At the very beginning we went and sat down with the historians. We went and talked to a number of key historians and then they brought together a bigger team – in effect, 14 of New Zealand’s leading historians – and we then workshopped. We sat down with them and we worked out how we could do this, is it possible, and how we could actually tell the history of New Zealand in a way which made kind of sense – make sense for television, make sense in a book, and would add something new to the whole…the literature of history in New Zealand.
So, it was a long process to get to that point, and when it came down to it…and David had a lot more to do with this, at the tough end if you like. That was the easy bit, deciding on how we would shape New Zealand history into 13 hours and assigning historians to work on it. They went away first of all and wrote the history – the big essays – and then we took those and made them into television. It’s a long process, and then they [historians] were always there to double check. But, then David had a lot to do with the process. At every point we had to cut stuff out; at every point we had to decide which is more important, which tells the thesis that we are following more efficiently. Then the hard decisions were made down the track – weren’t they David?
- David Filer
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Yes, the key decisions tend to be around looking for very good characters who would carry a story – exciting people like prime ministers, and war heroes, and immigrant families, who could each take a part of the story – and then looking at the dramatic stories that go around these characters. Each 50 minute episode is divided into five pieces because of advertising breaks, so in each piece you tend to have one or two major dramatic stories and three or four really interesting people to help us tell the story.