Why should I care about a backpack?
Marketing people are using emotional storytelling to sell their products. Why? Because it works!
Here are two online videos from LL Bean:
This one uses a lot of still photos. It also has a journey in a non narrated interview.
This one also uses still photos with a more traditional narrative.
Why should I care about a backpack? Because it’s not really about the backpack.
Really loved everything about this story, sent our way by CUNY VSW alum Mary Shell.
this story has an amazing character who is thoughtful, reflective and very well spoken and who gives us some surprisng insights into what seems like a violent sport.
The story has a visual and narrative arc, it’s beautifully captured with a ton of great closeups and it has powererful sound to put you there. Brilliant!!, as the British say!
I was heading down the stairs at school the other day when someone called out “Anika‘s watching a video and she’s getting all teary eyed.”
And so Anika sent me the video. And I got teary eyed too.
To me it’s a wonderful story and an even better story about an issue for a number of reasons: it has conflict, it has change, it has emotion, it has an unfolding action and it helps me see another view on an issue.
What is doesn’t have is a reporter/narrator, no multiple talking heads (not a single talking head) it has no experts, it does not have multiple sides of the issue.
But it makes me feel something and to understand a little more through that feeling.
And the best part…it’s a true story..
…..and it’s an web ad.
Which brings me back to Anika, who asked me: “Why aren’t more journalists telling stories this way?”
Why indeed?
Here’s a really nice piece of video cut to music that consists only of still images. Cool take on a wedding video too.
Theo Rigby, the guy behind this fun video, has directed, shot and edited another great story about an immigrant family who has both parents deported: Sin Pais One of the assignments is a story about an issue. This would count as a powerful way to tell that story.
Here’s the trailer.
I’m a huge fan of the TV show Breaking Bad. It’s brilliantly written and plotted, beautifully filmed and always surprising, and I’ve only watched the first three seasons.
Here’s an example of using surprise in storytelling. Up until the first minute mark, you’re not quite sure what thye’re talking about or what they’re creating in all those tubes. Is it what you expected?
We had 3 weeks of incredible films in my class. The last 2 weeks were my favs: check out Film Festival Two and Film Festival Three
Inspired by everyone I found a few more:
I love the energy and visual style of this romp through Bombay with two guys recording sounds as the basis for music. Notice their use of the tiny GoPro camera, which we have available! send me an email if you want to use it.
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and also this powerful trailer about the storyteller’s Dad, and the line between brilliance and genius:
I’ve never read William Zinsser‘s classic book: On Writing Well but I clearly should. In part, it’s because one of his 5 tips on how to become a better writer is a huge central concept of how to become a better visual storyteller: take me on a journey. In video for the web in this class (and as a whole) , you need to take someone on a journey, not just give a report.
William Zinsser, a fourth-generation New Yorker, at a subway station near his office in mid-Manhattan.
Here’s an excerpt from a recent phone interview he gave to Poynter.org
“All writing to me is a journey. It’s saying to the reader, ‘Come along with me; I’ll take you on a voyage,’ ” Zinsser said. “These writers do that by never losing sight of the fact that they are telling a story.”
Too often, Zinsser said, people become so preoccupied with writing well that they clutter their stories with unnecessary words that lead readers astray. Good writers make every word count, and they avoid abstractions. “Nobody wants abstractions,” Zinsser said. “They want specific details that help them discover something new.”Ahhh, details. I feel like I beat and beat and beat the concept that close-ups and extreme closeups are crucial to good visual story telling. Nice to see they’re crucial to the written version too.
Adam Westbrook's Video Decision Workflow
Adam Westbrook has a cool post on How To Make Boring Things Interesting in Video.
At the least, when you think of a story for video, run it through this flowchart.
A story is about a very narrow specific part of that topic, often based on a specific character that has a name and a phone number and a surprise
Here’s an excerpt from Adam’s post:
What is video bad at?
Human emotions are probably the most complex things out there but video can convey them better than any other medium. When it comes to other complex issues however, video is out of its depth:“There’s no such thing as boring knowledge. Only boring presentation.”…Dan Roam read more here…
Via Adam Westbrook: Should You Make That Story into a Video? Follow the Flow..
There are two reasons I’m not a fan of narration and voice over….
1) Narration is often often pedantic and poorly written. I realize that it’s very difficult to write clever narration. So I don’t get why it’s overused by reporters who can’t seem to be bothered to have subjects tell their stories in their own words. Sometimes, with a limit amount of time, narration seems like the best way to tell a complicated story in a short time (or rescue a poor talker). But sometimes it’s just the idea that the reporter “can tell it better” or “knows more” than the subject. Arghhh.
2) Voicing narration well is a real art. And I don;’t often hear it done that well. Plus there’s just something about that “voice of god,” tone that really bugs me (btw, I thought God was a woman; so why is so much voice over done by men?) In any case, that just doesn’t work on the web. I’ll let Ira Glass mention a reason:
This question of tone, of how we accidentally alienate potential listeners, is something lots of people in public radio have been talking about lately. A 2010 NPR/SmithGeiger survey of news consumers who rightly should be in the public radio audience, showed that one of the biggest reasons adults say they choose not to listen to public radio is that they’re put off by the tone. One survey respondent said: “This type of story could be interesting, but the reporter’s voice and intonation is soooo affected, upper class, wasp, Ph.D. student-like, it detracts from the story. She speaks like she is writing a novel.” Radiolab has invented a sound that won’t put off smart people who should be in our audience. Simply put: it’s a show that’s out for fun. It’s no surprise that a much younger audience loves Radiolab. It’s no surprise that a huge part of its fan base is people who don’t consider themselves public radio listeners.
But these two guys, Radiolab’s co-creators Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, use a lot of their own voices in their program. But the way they do it makes me really love it. Have a listen.
Ira Glass continues:
“Real journalism – and by that I mean fact-based reporting – is getting trounced by commentary and opinion in all its forms, from Fox News to the political blogs to Jon Stewart. Everyone knows newspapers are in horrible trouble. TV news continually loses ratings. And one way we broadcast journalists can fight back and hold our audience is to sound like human beings on the air. Not know-it-all stiffs. One way the opinion guys kick our ass and appeal to an audience is that they talk like normal people, not like news robots speaking their stentorian news-speak. So I wish more broadcast journalism had such human narrators at its center. I think that would help fact-based journalism survive. But like I say, I’m kind of a nut on this subject.”
Check out the entire piece at Transom.org.
A fellow journalist & teacher recently told me he was surprised that we used music with our stories in this class.
There’s no doubt that music has a tremendous power to change the way people feel about a story. I know I wouldn’t use music with a news story but for stories about the rest of our lives, why not? Music is such a big part of our lives and culture and history.
Here’s a great example of how music can change the way we perceive a story, as a humorous mashup, using the dramatic music from the movie Inception and grafting it on to some pretty famous dramatic movie climaxes. This particular version “When Harry Met Inception”, is only slightly NSFW but follow the Wired Magazine link for some other great examples, most NSFW.
Personally, I think everything thing we do as storytellers is manipulation and we just need to start with that statement as the baseline. But maybe that’s a conversation better continued outside the classroom.[For a better mind than mine, check out Ken Burns brilliant take on Jean Luc Godard's famous "Cinema is truth 24 times a second".]
Thoughts?
Here’s a lovely example of a powerful story using strong close-ups and a simple unfolding action. There is no interview, no narrator. It has great use of sound, editing techniques and music to build to a crescendo.
The first minute of this trailer is brilliant, especially in the way they marry the images and sound to give a greater meaning to each (check out the great effect of words and pictures at 00.45).
I love the story too. They did a really wonderful job of making a boring scene–someone writing or reading a book–wonderfully entertaining and visual. It’s a great example of brilliant editing and wonderful visual thinking
The length of an online video isn’t that important, unless it’s too long. What’s important is that people remember it. Here’s two from “60 second Film School.”
and another about why every story–print, audio, or video–needs a story arc.
Issue stories can be boring and argumentative unless you think of telling them in a compelling way.
Remember, good stories are often surprising…and advocacy doesn’t have to be a bad thing.
About once a year people in class respond to a rough cut spontaneously, instinctively.
The rough cut from the second assignment was due in Video Storytelling for the Web class this Thursday.The assignment was a story about a place.
This rough cut, shot by Kenny Christensen and Anika Anand and edited by Kenny Christensen, hooked the class this week. I even heard some subtle applause.
Awesome work Kenny and Anika …however, every story can be better so I’m psyched to see the fine cut in class next week.
I remember watching Hollywood Squares as a kid but it wasn’t nostalgia that caught my eye when I spied the NYTimes story about the MTV version (word) but that the crew in this photo was using DSLR’s to film footage for the show. That’s the same camera we’re using in class, the same camera that Frontline uses for their PBS documentary show, the same camera that fuels every video piece on the NYTimes.
It feels good to be hip for a change, at least in terms of the camera. OK, the camera doesn’t matter, it’s all about the story. But it’s good to know that we have the same gear as one of the hippest shows on MTV.
(NYTimes photo by Richard Perry)
I was struck with the beautiful visuals in this story, shot by Rick Gershon , a staff producer at MediaStorm. You can see that Rick’s sequential shooting and his use of closeups make this a very powerful visual story.
You can watch a shorter version of the story and read a bit of the methodology of how they told the story at the MediaStorm site.
Here’s a story with no interview (but a story that transmits an amazing amount of information). You’ll notice he used still pictures too.
America’s Dead Sea by Jim Lo Scalzo
winner of third prize in the 2012 World Press Multimedia Competition.
If you’d like to know more, click through to the story’s Vimeo page where there’s text to explain the rest of the story. I didn’t need it.
Watch what the judges say about the winners in the World Press Competition. Some great insights on storytelling and multimedia.
I’m often complaining about 60 minutes because while they do great journalism, I’m not sure they do good tv; their mantra often seems to be “tell, don’t show.” But I thought they did a good job with a 60 minutes Overtime about Sanjay Gupta and Sal Khan . I even enjoyed it.
Why?
Yes, it has the requisite studio interview but what made it interesting is that there was a story and a scene that powered the story. Basically, Sanjay Gupta makes a video with Sal Khan. And they broke the typical network tv corespondent persona as the all knowing, all seeing expert. Gupta is a neurosurgeon but he admitted to being a little nervous about doing the video. The the arc of the piece is simple: we watch them record the video in a 2 camera shoot.
this morning I was chatting with Andrew Devigal, the NYTimes Multimedia editor. He told me about judging the POYi contest for multimedia.
He also sent a link to one of his favorite pieces, Afrikaner Blood, the first video on this list.
He told me he thought the piece was near perfect, that he forgot he was watching a multimedia piece and that he wanted to see more. Check it out and tell me if you agree.
Really nice radio story on Marketplace radio tonight, Alex Chadwick interviewing an American nuclear tech who was at the Daiichi Nuclear power plant.
There’s a great moment in this video too. I love how Chadwick just shuts up and listens to Carl Pillitteri as he unspools his amazing tale about what happened in the plant in the moments of the earthquake.
Here’s the radio report as it was heard on Marketplace.
Two examples of cinematic storytelling in a long form non-fiction story, both on the same story from Esquire and from GQ, both in the same month. Notice how details build the anticipation and power of the opening, especially in the Esquire piece. That’s one reason we shoot a lot of details in visual storytelling.
Stark powerful B&W photos by Pari Dukovic in the Esquire piece.
Samuel Ebat used some cool edit tricks in his video 270 Seconds of Summer . Ask me and I can explain how he did most of them.
