At first this advice may sound too obvious to even consider - but please do consider it well. If you want to make great videos, tell a story.
Story is the difference between a bunch of random images and a meaningful video experience. It’s what sticks with your audience even when they don’t remember everything they saw or heard on your video. It’s what inspires an audience member to walk up to you after your vacation video, shake your hand and say, “Man, I really felt like I was right there with you!”
Story is the thread that holds your video together. It gives it shape, heart. Consider the difference between a generic commercial that just shows a car zipping around to a pounding rock beat and one of those brilliantly clever Volkswagen commercials. A story doesn’t have to take long to tell - but its meaning will stay with your audience for a very long time.
At its most basic, story is simply about change. It’s about how an event changes a person, a situation or a relationship. Story is about why a character at the beginning of your video is different from that character at the end. And this doesn’t mean that story is limited to narrative or fiction. If you’ve had the good fortune to see such brilliant recent documentaries as “Spellbound” or “Born Into Brothels,” you know that real stories of real people, well told, are every bit as powerful and dramatic as anything Hollywood dreams up. And there are opportunities for us to tell stories like that on video every day.
It’s always about structure
A few years ago, my parents celebrated their 50th anniversary, and my siblings and I decided to put together a party, including a video presentation, for them and some of their dearest friends. With the help of my sisters, I gathered dozens of great, old photos. I could very easily have just scanned in the pictures, created a slideshow, added a sentimental soundtrack and that probably would have been enough. With an event that inherently emotional, you can’t go wrong. But I decided to make the video more than just a collection of images. I decided to make it the story of their lives together. Your job, as a storyteller, is to show how the events in your movie changed everyone involved.
The structure was simple. I conceived the video as five chapters, each one a story about a significant segment of their lives. These chapters weren’t very long. The entire video didn’t run more than 20 minutes. But each of those little four or five minute chapters told of a significant event and how it changed their lives.
The first chapter was, naturally, about how the two of them met. I gathered some photos of them growing up along with early pictures of them together, and I supplemented them some music representing the times, and then I audio interviewed with each of them describing how they came together.
Chapter two told the story of the cold January day when they got married. Chapter three told of how my dad, a construction worker, quite literally built the house that the two of them raised my sisters, brother and I in. Subsequent chapters told of the growth of their family and of how each of the children now have families of their own. It’s old but effective Hollywood advice: Tell your audience what you’re going to show them; then show them; then tell them what you showed them.
These were simple stories. Just a brief beginning, middle and an end showing how their lives had changed as a result of the experience. But the end result left the audience with the feeling that they’d been a part of my parents’ lives together. Rather than just a photo album or a slideshow, the resultant DVD became a keepsake that merited a dozen requests for copies and which my parents still play for anyone willing to sit through it.
The reason it is so meaningful? In a word: It tells stories.
Every moment has a context
Remember that no moment happens in a vacuum. A wedding is a powerfully emotional event, but it doesn’t just happen at the altar. It’s one of the most significant event in the lives of two people. But it goes even deeper than that. A wedding doesn’t just involve a bride and groom. It’s also about the uniting of two families. A celebration with friends. If your wedding video only shows close-ups of two people exchanging vows, you’ve missed the opportunity to tell an important story. And fleshing out the context of it all is the key.
With pictures, video and interviews, tell the story of the relationship - of how it began and how it all led to this point. Get video of the families as well as their points of view. Tell how we came to this great point in these people’s lives.
Show your audience where these events are happening, who is watching, what time of day, what the weather is like, etc. An establishing shot - a wide shot of the scene or an outdoor shot of the building - gives your audience a feeling for the context of the events.
Show the preparation for the ceremony and party. Get lots of establishing shots – the outside of the church and/or reception hall and/or the house. Show the weather, the season, the time of day. And, during the ceremony, while you’re shooting the ceremony, make sure someone else is getting reaction shots from the guests. There’s much more going on here than simply the bride and groom exchanging vows. Be sure to get the tear in the eye of the father of the bride. Mom’s glowing face. The groomsman flirting with the maid of honor. It’s all part of the story. And the more you include, the more rich, real and powerful the whole video experience will be.
Remember our golden rule: Story is about the difference between where your video begins and where it ends up. Show a man and woman exchanging vows and you’ll have a record of an event. Show how that event changed them and everyone involved and you’ll tell a great story that everyone will treasure forever!
What’s the meaning of this?
Last year, after a lifetime of dreaming about it, my family and I had the opportunity to go to northern Italy and to visit my grandfather’s home town. I could easily have shot the whole thing as a travelogue and it would have worked. The scenery is beautiful, the train rides exciting and the people are charming. But this trip was so much more to me than scenery and train rides and colorful characters. It was about a search for my roots, about meeting family I’d never met before, about overcoming language differences and finding our commonalities and, above all, about walking the very streets my grandfather had walked a century before. I knew that the key to making my video vital was somehow conveying those meanings in it.
I ran video almost continuously, capturing those precious moments when my American family and my Italian family first exchanged clumsy but effective greetings. I shot as much of the context as I could. The scenery. The tour of the house and the wonderful little details like the exchanging of gifts and the serving of meals.
And through it all, I kept in mind my throughline: This was the story of a journey back to the place that my grandfather had left a century ago. I took every opportunity to interview my hosts about the town, about my grandfather and about what it must have been like to leave a place like this, with no idea what lay ahead, knowing he’d likely never return.
When it came time to edit my hours of footage, I kept that throughline in mind. I made sure the spirit of my grandfather - or at least a sense of family – was in nearly every scene. I added map graphics, old photos of my grandfather and his family, appropriate music and narration - and, where necessary, subtitles.
Narration can help pull a story together and explain things that may not be immediately apparent. But more so, in this case, it personalized the story that was being told.
Don’t just show what happened. Show why the moment has meaning and relevance.I wanted this to be my story, told from my point of view. And so, wherever possible, I added narration explaining what was going on and why the events I’d recorded meant so much to me. When the video shows our arrival by train in Mozzate, it’s clear that this is a deeply spiritual moment for me and for my family.
And, whenever possible, I let the scene itself tell the story. When my Italian “cousin” shows me the house where my grandfather was born or the basin at the 500 year old church where my grandfather and her grandmother were baptized, the moments I was able to capture are intimate, touching and powerful. And so I let them play as is.
The final DVD tells a single, cohesive story. Rather than being a collection of random travelogue-style sequences or a look at the scenery and people of Italy, it becomes our deeply personal story - a story of how we were all changed by these recorded events in real and powerful ways. The success of this project was told in the greatest compliment a videographer could receive: “I felt like I was right there with you guys, Steve.” Success!
By the way, those hours of video I shot cut down to a DVD that runs less than half an hour. The sequence in Mozzate runs a little over 10 minutes. Just a reminder that your video doesn’t haven’t be long to tell a good story well. And, in fact, brief pieces with strong themes often have the most powerful impact.
And in conclusion
Finally, remember that nothing sums up a video like literally summing up the video. A concluding quote - whether shown as a title card, or heard as final thoughts via narration or a key clip from an interview - can really bring the meaning of your entire video home for your audience.
Summing your movie up, with either a final quote, a final clip from an interview or even concluding narration (especially with a brief montage of clips from the preceding movie), can leave a lasting impression on your audience and can really bring home the meaning of your piece.
It literalizes everything that makes the story you have just told a story: the meaning, the significance, how the events you’ve just shown changed everyone involved.
Those final words give your audience something to take away from the whole experience. A chance to review the events they’ve just witnessed in their minds and to consider why the moments you’ve just shared with them were worth the time, effort and cost of producing this movie. A way to make the theme and story resonate with the audience long after the movie ends and the lights come up.
It’s a trick that’s long been used by the pros in Hollywood but, like many Hollywood tricks, it’s one well worth finding inspiration in.