What is a Story Producer?

Defining job titles in the realm of reality television is often difficult if not impossible as the line between jobs can be blurry at best.  Also, there are hundreds of production companies out there, and they all have their own way of working, so your title doesn't always translate from company to company.  So, with that caveat, depending on where you work or the type of show, the duties of a story producer may include all or some of the following:

• field logging
• interviewing talent on camera
• field producing scenes
• writing hot sheets
• tracking story through field and/or post 
• beating out the episode, creating a story grid
• finding and watching all of the raw footage
• cutting stringouts/papercutting
• managing editors and handling their requests for footage and interview bites
• creating frankenbites
• researching any science or statistics used in graphics or VO
• writing VO
• writing and conducting pick-up interviews
• addressing notes (in-house and then from the network)
• working with production coordinators to secure releases for subjects/ locations / artwork / photos / music / articles, etc
• making sure the episode includes all advertising and graphics requirements, conforms to S&P, and is to time
• Watching down outputs for QC

We will discuss many of these bullet points in detail in later posts.  But for now, you can see it's a lot to do and usually not a lot of time to do it in.  An average hour of reality television is in post production for about five to seven weeks before going to the network as a rough cut.

Your average story producer for a non-union show is paid by the week and therefore can be (and usually is) worked to the bone for as many hours per week as they can stay awake.  Ideally a story producer will be in the field during the shooting of his episode(s), conducting his own interviews, writing his own logs, etc.  But often story producers are not included until the post production process, starting a week or two before their editors begin cutting the show.  So, the trick is to keep "feeding the machine," that is, keep one step ahead of the editor with stringouts and everything they need so that story is already thought through and they can concentrate just on editing.  All the while, story producers must keep the full episode in mind, track story at all times, and make sure everything flows storywise.  The episode basically only exists in the story producer's head until there is a rough cut.

On a non-union show, the story producer will use an Avid editing system to make basic edits to the raw footage, cutting it down and streamlining it as much as possible before it goes to the editor, adding interview bites where needed.  On a union show, the story producer is not allowed to touch an Avid and must write his stringouts using tape numbers and time codes, and they are later assembled by an AE (this is called papercutting).  I personally cannot imagine a world without using my Avid for story, it just makes the whole process go so much faster, it's a much more immediate way to see if a scene is working, and it's just more fun.

Sometimes a story producer is lucky enough to have a story editor, which is basically an assistant to the story producer.  They share in the duties, but they are not held accountable if something goes wrong, and they generally handle the less important scenes or requests.  Ideally, the story editor and story producer are a team that work on several episodes together, but often due to budget constraints there are more story producers than story editors and they act as sort of a "story editor pool," where any editor or producer can make requests of them and those requests are prioritized by deadline.  

That's basically what a story producer does.