All Gas No Brakes, and narrative techniques
All Gas No Brakes is an ongoing series of short-form documentaries hosted on YouTube. In it, Andrew Callaghan tours the USA in his RV, stopping off at fringe cultural events — and more recently, protests — to let the people there talk. And talk they do — all gas, no brakes.
This week I was introduced to narrative techniques on my Multiplatform & Mobile Journalism MA course at BCU. Using these, I will critically analyse how All Gas No Brakes tells it’s stories.
Mode, audience and genre
All Gas No Brakes is a multimodal piece of media. Its primary offering is online video hosted on YouTube, but there are accompanying social media channels (Instagram and Patreon) posting video, image and text content, along with a podcast for audio content.
The YouTube videos fall into the short-form documentary genre. It is a participatory documentary series, with Andrew Callaghan appearing on camera, and directly interacting with the subjects. This is just one way to make a documentary — you can read about more here.
The audience for these videos appears to be young adults. The whole media product only exists online, is fronted by a young man, and often has a mocking or comedic element to it. There are editing techniques present in the videos that are common in online video for young people too— axial/zoom cuts on funny/outrageous sentences and expressions, for example.
Narrators and actors
I’ll use this video as an example from now on;
Andrew Callaghan is the narrator. He presents the show and questions the contributors. You could argue that he is an actor in the show too, in a meta sense — the series is about him driving across America after all, he drives the narrative by asking those questions and deciding where to go, and gets a lot of screen time and reaction shots — but I would argue that his presence is not the focus, and his is not the story being told.
The actors are everyone who appears on camera to answer Callaghan’s questions. These people are rarely named, but are all encouraged to give their views at length, and explain what’s going on, or give their motivations. They are the characters, and together with the visuals (and the text description) they give us our sense of setting, and movement.
Setting and movement
The overall setting is Portland, Oregon, where a Black Lives Matter protest is happening. Inside that, there two smaller, distinct settings — one on the streets at night, with the protest in full swing; and the other in a park in the day, presumably preparing for the protests. There is also a small sequence that cuts to footage of news anchors talking about the protests, which could represent the setting of “TV news media” — how everyone not at the protests experiences them.
The movement that drives the story along — conflict — is immediately apparent, with a chant of “ACAB! All Cops Are Bastards!” being the first thing on screen. This theme is carried on throughout, both with what the actors say as they’re being interviewed, and the contrasts from each major scene to the next (more on that in the next section). Conflict also comes into the point of the story, which I’ll discuss in the next section.
The video could have been much shorter, but a lot of that time is given over to vertical movement. Susan Friedman describes vertical movement as “reading down” into a text to give complexity, rather than horizontal movement which is more like the chronological, “… and then” way you could construct a narrative. Here, vertical movement is provided by interviewing many different actors, showing many scenes of the protest at various stages, and showing the police and National Guardsmen standing off against protestors. None of these shots and scenes are strictly necessary to understand the video — in fact, it’s not clear exactly “when” a lot of shots happen in the narrative — but they add to it.
The point?
There is no narration that tells us explicitly about the point the video is trying to make. However, the sequence of events implies the point — it tells the story that many people with many different motivations are attending these BLM protests, some not necessarily for the good of the BLM movement. The clearest implication of this point comes in the final three minutes — an interview with three PDX Black Youth Movement organisers cuts to scenes of a nudist in the streets, or a “Viking” with a trumpet, or a drunk man trying to rile up riot police. The three organisers talking frankly about the reasons for the protests, and the role that white people can play in it, contrasts and conflicts wildly with the actions those white people are shown doing.
Takeaways
This short documentary made me think about the roles of narrators and actors — a lot of the news media that I consume has clearly defined narrators and actors. The narrators provide the horizontal movement, and the actors provide the vertical movement. This is a norm for news media because it’s very easy to follow, and the narrator guides you through it. In the All Gas No Brakes videos however, Callaghan does very little, and allows the actors and the visuals to tell most of the story instead. This way of doing things also invites the audience into it’s point or conclusion, rather than telling them outright — this mimetic storytelling is something I should try.
However, I can see how leaning heavily on mimetic storytelling as this video does might confuse or mislead an audience as to the point of the story, or require multiple watches — some diegetic elements, like the narrator telling you the what, where, when and why, would help make things clearer.
It’s also made me keen to experiment with editing styles in video and audio too. What drove home the point described in the previous section was the contrast between the actors in each shot and scene, rather than anything said by a narrator or explicitly pointed at. It’s an interesting way to make a point!
