Mythbusters & Storytelling

So on Sunday, I along with about 3,000 other people journeyed to the Dean Smith Center to spend a few hours with these guys:

These guys being, of course, Jamie and Adam from Discovery’s long-running TV series “Mythbusters”:

Each MythBusters episode focuses typically on several popular beliefs, Internet rumors, or other myths. The list of myths tested by the series is compiled from many sources.

And judging from the frenzied response of the crowd, the pair are pretty much approaching rock star status. They didn’t blow up anything, but they did share a bunch of behind-the-scene anecdotes, showed a video of Jamie lighting his own farts, and ended with a video montage of what they call “Explosion Porn,” with four ginormous sub-woofers rocking out the Dean Dome. 

Three things to share with you. First, the duo made the point again and again about the importance of embracing failure as part of not only the scientific process but also life in general:

For 90 minutes Sunday, Discovery Channel heroes Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage sang the virtues of screwing up, assuring an audience of adoring 11-year-olds that it’s OK if the lava doesn’t always shoot out of your science-fair volcano, or if you flip the switch on your Erector Set robot and its head topples off. Science is persisting through repeated fiascos, they said.

“If we actually knew what we were doing,” Hyneman told Sunday’s Dean Dome crowd, “we wouldn’t be any fun to watch.”

The second thing is a story to illustrate their point:

There was… the time the MythBusters tried to find out whether sugar-coated cereals really contained less nutrition than the cardboard-box packaging.

They fed wholesome cereal to one set of lab rats, chocolate-frosted sugar bombs to a second, and cardboard flakes to an unlucky third. After a few days, the cardboard rats were jumpy and rapidly losing weight, but their plight didn’t seem so dire that the experiment had to be halted.

Then one morning, the MythBusters arrived to find two of the three cardboard-fed rats were missing, and that the survivor was noticeably fatter. “I held him to the camera and said, ‘This is what happens when mice attack!’ “ Savage said.

“Then I fed him to the snake,” Hyneman said.

This footage remains hidden, never to be aired. Lessons learned, say the MythBusters.

The third thing, and what I was most interested in, was how they approached finding and developing the stories they use on the series. They have a process and it goes like this:

* Concept: They aggregate story possibilities, either through their research team, items Jamie or Adam find along the way, or suggestions from their viewers.

* Brainstorm: They kick around each concept to see if it has legs or not as a possible TV ‘plot’.

* Development: They hash out ways to execute the story on camera.

* Plotting: They figure out the flow of the narrative, where they start out (Beginning), how they construct the experiment (Middle), and the big conclusion (End)

Then they go shoot the episode.

In other words, it’s a lot like screenwriting. Only with explosives.

For more on Jamie and Adam’s appearance in Chapel Hill on Sunday, go here.