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 cultural events to interview people there.
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. It’s mainly an online video series hosted on YouTube, but there are also social media channels (Instagram and Patreon) posting short video, images and text content, along with a podcast for audio content.
The audience for these videos appears to be young adults. All Gas No Brakes only exists online, is presented 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 — zoom cuts and jump cuts on funny/outrageous situations, for example.
Narrators and actors
Watch this video as an example;
Callaghan is the narrator. He presents the show and questions the contributors. You could argue that he is an actor in the show too— the series is about him driving across America — but I would argue that his presence is not the focus.
The actors are everyone else who appears on camera. These people are rarely named, but are characterised instead through their speech and actions. These characters, along with the visuals and text description, give the video it’s setting and movement.
Setting and movement
The overall setting is Portland, Oregon, where a Black Lives Matter protest is happening. Inside that, there are two smaller settings — one at the protest at night, and another in a park at day, away from the protest.
There is also a sequence of 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 set up immediately, with a chant of -
“ACAB! All Cops Are Bastards!”
This theme is carried on throughout, both with what the actors say, and the contrasts from each interview to the next. Conflict also comes into the point of the story, which we’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 scenes of the protest at various stages, and showing the police standing off against protesters. Not all of these scenes are necessary to understand the video, 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 movement.
The best example of this point comes in the last three minutes. An interview with three PDX Black Youth Movement organisers cuts to scenes of a nudist in the streets, or a drunk man trying to rile up riot police. The organisers are talking about the reasons for the protests, and the role that white people can play in it. This conflicts 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. 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— 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.
What did you think of the Portland Protest video by All Gas No Brakes? Do you agree or disagree with this analysis of it? Write in the comments below, or join the discussion on Twitter.
This article is an edited version of a previous article. It was edited using the BASIC principles described in Week 2 of the MMJ MA at BCU.
