It doesn’t matter if you’re shooting on a multi-thousand dollar cinema camera or editing with the latest industry software, you can make a video look beautiful. But it doesn’t matter either if you know all about how to use your color grading tool or you can use every VFX trick in the book. If you aren’t telling a story, you haven’t made anything memorable. You’ve made a video, which is a far cry from a film. Whether that video is a short film, documentary, corporate video, advert, or TikTok clip, you must learn to craft great stories to make something that is worth watching.
The Importance of a Story
Humans tell stories. They also like to hear them and remember the best ones. Stories evoke feelings, convey meaning, and help us to better digest and understand the world. This is why great videos are remembered not for how good they look, but how well they tell stories that we can relate to. Even the humblest story is worth telling if the story is interesting and meaningful. This is often more effective in conveying meaning than all the fancy visuals that the average human is willing to pay for.
A Video Needs a Point
Before you even pick up a camera, ask yourself, “What do I want the audience to see and experience in my video?” This will be the main story of your video. Every scene, shot, edit, camera movement, and effect can all support the main story you’re trying to tell. A clear and concise story helps focus your production in meaningful ways.
Story Structure
Most videos follow a very basic structure.
Beginning: Introduce your subject, character, or problem. Give us an introduction that makes us want to keep watching.
Middle: Develop that story with a problem, an explanation, or a key event.
End: Bring it to a conclusion, resolution, or final message.
It’s that simple. Feature films, documentaries, short clips, corporate videos, TV commercials, and even TikTok videos use these basics.
Emotional Connection
People are likely to remember stories that make them feel things. If you want to make a video that people remember for a long time, you have to focus on what can trigger emotion: personal and emotional experiences, realistic situations, authentic moments, authentic details, authentic colors, and authentic music. Even if you’re making a corporate video, an educational video, or a TV advertisement, you must include human elements to make it truly compelling.
Telling a Story through Pictures
One of the unique features of video production is that the entire story can be told without using dialogue at all. The lighting, composition, movement, and colors in your shots can all convey meaning to your viewers. A close-up shot can convey a character’s emotional state while a wide shot can convey the character’s loneliness or the vastness of the landscape. Good filmmakers can tell a part of their stories through their images.
Editing Creates the Story
Editing shapes your story long after you’ve stopped filming. It helps control the pacing and tension, and determines how you share information. A change in the order or length of a shot can change the entire story. Editing is one of the most powerful storytelling tools that filmmakers use.
Developing Your Storytelling Skills
You become a better storyteller when you study storytelling. Study films, advertise, TV shows, and YouTube clips, or even create your own. The more video content you produce, the better you’ll be at learning what captures an audience’s interest and helps make the video memorable and meaningful to them.
The Evolution of Storytelling
New technology is constantly being introduced to filmmakers to help them tell their stories better. But the story has always been important to making a good film, and the stories that get told will only evolve. Learn to tell meaningful stories, and you’ll be able to tell them on any budget, in any format, and on any device. At the end of the day, viewers may forget your cinematography or the best special effects in the video, but they will likely never forget a story they enjoyed or that they took meaning from.