5 Questions to Focus on Your Video's Story
I'm attaching a link to my bike video. I had fun shooting it, but feel like something is missing in the final version. Your thoughts?
Richard
It looks like you had fun, Richard. The shots look great. But to make them more interesting, try linking them to some kind of story.
Without a story, the biking images are just that– images. They start to feel repetitive after a bit. We're watching nice eye candy, but the brain attached to our eyes starts to wonder what it all means. We want to know what's going on. Who's involved. What the stakes are.
You can help intrigue us by focusing your video on some questions that, if answered, lead to story. Any kind of story helps us pay attention. Choose one of these questions and think about how your shooting and editing decisions would be different if you answered it in the video.
1. Who is the hero? Picking a hero– any hero– helps focus your video. Is there a contestant you really like? A relative, perhaps, or an underdog? Giving us a hero to watch makes us to want to see what happens.
2. What's the challenge? Suppose you made an entire video about bikers trying to make it over a log bridge without wiping out. Now your video is focused on that one stunt, and we want to see what happens. Will anyone do it?
3. What's the conflict? Another way to look at challenge is character vs. character. How do you win this event? Who's in contention? Who's the good guy, who's the bad, who's the underdog?
4. What are the consequences? What's looming out there for the winner or loser? How does that play into the competition?
5. What's your journey? What's the story of the person shooting the video? Why are you there? What do you want to see or find out? Narrate, or interview yourself on camera. You can even have others talk about or to you.
