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With more content being produced than ever before, both videos on websites and social media, businesses are in a constant battle to capture and hold people’s attention. People have moved from reading content to skimming it. The platforms are saturated when it comes to content. There is simply too much content out there in the world, so it’s important to strategize how to make your video stand out from the crowd.
A storyline is a model of how you intend to build, tell and organize your video to capture and hold the viewer’s attention.
There is also a big difference in storylines, which is important to keep in mind. Creating a storyline for a documentary is not quite the same as it is for a social media video. People behave differently on social media than when they watch a documentary. Getting someone’s full attention is much harder on social media than it is when they have deliberately chosen to turn on a documentary.
For this reason, storylines vary greatly depending on where it is to be shown (distribution), what the purpose of the video is, how many people are involved and how to arouse the viewer’s curiosity.
It is difficult to say how a storyline should be made, as there are a lot of factors that determine the outcome of a good storyline.
But instead of writing what a good storyline is, we will actually show you with an example in the hope that you will better understand the process of a good storyline.
We were commissioned by koldingvideostudio to make a video about a parkour practitioner who suffered a serious knee injury, and it will be shown where he talks about the injury. Next, there will be another transition where he talks about how he rehabbed his knee and returned to parkour.
The whole purpose of the video was that the video should initially create a sad atmosphere and the viewer should feel pity for the person in the video. Then we have the middle part of the video where he talks about how hard it was both mentally and physically to make it through that period. At the end of the video, there is a transition to a more inspiring scene where he jumps off a building and we see that he is back to doing parkour. The end of the video should leave the viewer motivated, inspired and smiling. It’s a coupling of all in one, as we see him doing parkour again after an injury, while in the outro he asks for a beer.
Here is the video:
As you might see from the video, we use a sad story to grab the viewer’s attention and end with an inspirational note at the end.
This was our storyline:
conflict
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Intro (who he is)
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Challenge (knee injury that took a toll on him)
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Overcoming the challenge (jumping around and doing parkour again)
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Outro (“beer” joke)
As you can see, your storyline needs to be adapted depending on what kind of story we want to tell and who appears in the video.
Before you start creating a storyline, it is important to consider the following:
Once you have answered the questions above, you have a good storyline to work from. It is important to think about how to connect with the viewer and how to achieve the purpose of the video.
Of course, video is not just TikTok and Snapchat. Instead, it is about telling a story. A story that can move the recipient in many different ways. The point of the above is that your story will be better told if you have a plan. Of course it is. Therefore, our biggest challenge to you is to always create a storyline, regardless of the complexity and size of your video. You can keep it relatively simple and still get the great effects of a storyline.
Of course, you can always contact us for non-binding advice or if you are interested in showcasing your projects on our community page or, for that matter, booking our facilities.
