8½ simple storytelling techniques for video recording

Once you find your plot, the rest of your story is really just hard work. Many can’t decide on a theme and are torn back and forth. Your plot doesn’t have to be perfect, because good stories don’t necessarily have the best plot.

Goals, conflicts and direction of your story

Next, we’ll briefly decide on a temporary title to make your plot more tangible for you. You can change the title at the end and optimize it for all eternities by splitting it. The preliminary title should give your story a direction that will serve as your goal during the elaboration.

First reduce your story to the essentials and abstract them through the decisive conflicts in as few sentences as possible. Think about superlatives and dramatic statements that polarize the direction of your story.

Polarizing examples:

1. Decay or Power
2. Wealth or poverty
3. Failure or success
4. Luck or bad luck
5. Love or hate
6. Strength or weakness
7. Stupidity or intelligence
8. Death or life
9. Light or darkness

With the help of this exciting statement, your story gains in dramaturgy, even if you don’t portray it as tragically as it sounds at first. The abstract exaggeration only helps to keep the overview.

A good story has, besides a climax, which is almost always experienced by the main character, two tangential turning points in its course. Later, after you have decided on a provisional title that abstracts your story in its content and polarizes it in its dramaturgy, you think about these points.

The working title of your story serves as a foundation:

• Conflicts create the dramaturgy of a story
• The direction of a story can be assumed from the plot
• The goals of your story are based on conflict and direction
• Good stories contain as little information as possible and as much as necessary.

Tasks:

1. Which direction should a story take so that you like to listen?
2. What minimal information describes your story?
3. What events make your story exciting?
4. What are the 10 most common conflicts in your favorite movies?
5. How would your customer behave before these conflicts?
6. What are the goals for the main character in your story?

The Turning Points

Even at the beginning of the narrative, the visitor should understand what it is all about. Either by a meaningful title, the presentation and contents of the website or by your introductory words.

It is crucial what you say and how you say it so that you have the chance to keep your visitor in the first place. Depending on the website, market and your personal touch, it can make sense to show the added value for your target group by addressing all keywords.

Every good business story has a conflict and triumph at the core and a turning point where a transformation takes place.

Dinesh Paliwal

However, this often creates the opposite effect, which ends with you being clicked away as an advertising gossip. Therefore, create an exciting atmosphere with your first sentences that suits you, your customer and your company, so that curiosity arises.

Again: The website is your stage and there is a reason why your visitor is here. Every single page of your website should provide the answers a visitor wants to hear when they click on it. So make sure you’re addressing the right goals and questions with your story.

After you’ve managed to captivate your listener for your story, you build into this dramaturgy. Almost all stories work with two turning points, through which the main character is steered in a different direction. This could be due to new information revealed throughout the story, but also through an inner change in the characters, such as when the emotional state changes.

The turning points can be positive or negative, but something has to happen at some point in the story. Turnarounds like a basketball player who climbs up to the pros, then graduates from Havard and becomes a millionaire can quickly become boring.

However, if you choose as your second turning point how he loses all his money after a failed assassination attempt, the viewer wonders what happened to him afterwards.

In the course of your story this technique can also be used on a small scale to build in some tension. In a car chase this is constantly used in action movies. At first there is no escape and then there is a road, but unfortunately it turns out to be a dead end. But then… you can imagine the rest 😉

What’s different is that a turning point is created by the narrated story and not by external circumstances like in the example of the chase.

The turning points serve you as intermediate goals in the construction of the narrative. All the details that appear in your story let you head for the turning point and thus give you certainty about the content. However, you can still touch on something that, for example, is only resolved at the end and has nothing to do with the impending turning point.

It is another popular method to build up tension. This allows you to saturate the before-after effect more clearly, which is useful for the punch line. You will learn later how easy it is to round off your story with a punch line and what magical effect this makes possible. But this only works if your story has the appropriate turning points, which leave a drastic effect on the listener.

Dramaturgy satisfies stories:

• The introduction to the story must somehow arouse curiosity.
• The question about the story lies in the reason why the website is visited
• The most common story-structure provides for two turning points
• Turning points increase tension and curiosity
• A before-and-after effect documents the development of a change
• In the course of a narrative, turning points can be used as intermediate goals.
• turning points ensure the emotional effect of the punch line

Tasks:

1. Which way of addressing almost every customer gets stuck with you?
2. How could you use this speech as a story?
3. Which events would be suitable as a turning point in this story?
4. What turning points do your favorite stories and movies have?
5. Which before-after effect is conveyed?