From Randy Olson: It's the Visuals, Stupid

That's one thing they ground into our little brains in film school. Film is a visual medium. A good test of how well you understand that is to show your film with the volume off and see if the viewer gets the same basic story.

And that would be a good test for the 60 Minutes segment on bluefin tuna. Take a look at it with the volume off. All you see is bountiful boatloads of happy fishermen with mountains of tuna. If you didn't hear the host say the tuna stocks were running out, you'd never know it.

Why would they do that? Because its a visual medium, and the producers select the shots that are most visually powerful and popular. An empty boat says nothing. A boatload of fish says lots.

So how would you go about producing that segment if you really wanted the viewer to get the message that we're running out of tuna? To begin with you would have to dismiss all concerns about popularity and ratings. Which would be foolish given the cost of producing television.

Producing media that convey a message versus producing media that are popular are rarely the same thing. They can be, but it takes a lot of thought and ingenuity.

This is the same problem we heard about at our Roundtable Evening 5 years ago from two of the world's top underwater cinematographers, Bob Talbot and Chuck Davis. They talked about how you make a show about the oceans and try to put in some images of dead coral reefs or ravaged kelp forests, but more often than not the cable channels buying the shows will ask to have it chopped out--nobody wants to look at dead ocean footage.

It's tough. And showing nothing but endless beauty shots of the oceans (as so many conservation groups are fond of doing) is simply a failure to meet the challenge.

Dead Oceans: Seriously, who wants to see this on their television?