Have you ever heard a joke that you knew was funny, but the person telling it mangles it so badly that they beat all of the humor out of it?
There’s an old prison joke,  stop me if you’ve heard it.

 
“A man is sent to prison for the first time.  At night after the lights  go out, an inmate yells out “Number 12”, and the whole cell block breaks out laughing.  A few minutes later someone yells “Number four”, and again all the inmates just break up.  The new guy asks his cell mate, “What’s going on?”  The older prisoner says “Well, we’ve all been here so long that we know the same jokes.  So we just yell out the number instead of telling the whole thing.”  So the new guy walks up to the bars and yells “Number six!”  and there is dead silence.  The new guys says “What gives?  How come no one laughed?”  The old cellmate says “some can tell’em, and some can’t”.

The same can certainly be true of a good video story.
In video, how we tell the story can be just as important as the story we tell.  If the technical quality is so poor, or the writing is scrambled, or the editing technique too sloppy... The story can get lost.

It Starts in the Field

It begins in the field, or studio, or wherever the story begins.  Is the story shot in a creative way?  Or is it shot from the same height, the same framing, the same angle?  So often, you will see footage that you know has all been shot from the same location and height in the room.  Just a little change in angle can keep the eye engaged in the visual story being told.  Same thing with the interview framing.  More times than not the great outdoors makes the best interview background; a fence line at an interesting angle, something interesting going on in the background, something besides a bookshelf or a desk.  Sometimes you are forced inside.  In those cases, I make two pleas; don’t shoot them against the wall and set up at least one light.  The last thing with the field shooting is don’t take a shortcut in the field that will put you into a hole later on.  Make sure you have enough footage to tell the story.

Put it on the Page

Obviously, the scriptwriting phase is of utmost importance in telling the story.  There are some obvious points that strengthen the story.  Good soundbite choices for one.  Don’t use sound bites from your subject that could be told much easier by a narrator.  We don’t want to hear facts from our subject, we want to hear and feel emotion.  The only other comment I would make about scriptwriting is this; a story needs to have some structure.  You wouldn’t want to watch a movie where one random scene follows another, but often times a script will appear, to quote a friend of mine, that the soundbites were all thrown up in the air and placed where ever they landed.  It’s important to have a beginning, a middle and an end.

Fix it in Post

The last element is in the post.  Often times, you have to live, or overcome, the mistakes that have gone on before, but there are a number of elements that will advance your story in the all important edit phase.  More than anything, storytelling in the edit suite is attention to detail.  By the time you get to the edit, you just don’t want to distract from the story you have.  You want to make sure the color is right, the audio levels are mixed so music and sound effects don’t distract from the interview or narrator, and that the visual effects advance the story, not stop it.  The one place where, I believe, that editing advances a story is in the pacing.  This is an area that is difficult to write about rules except to say if it feels like It’s dragging, it probably is.  

Know Any Good Stories

This list certainly isn’t exhaustive, the main thing is to become more aware of a good story or a bad one.  Whether someone is just telling a story or you are watching a big budget Hollywood picture, is it a good story or not, what draws you in?  How about your thoughts.  Have we missed anything?  What are the most important elements to you?  Heard any good jokes lately?