There are no hard and fast rules to storytelling. This is especially true when using video as the medium. The opportunities, tools and platforms we as production companies have to tell visual stories rapidly change, especially in the last decade we’ve been doing this work.
We’ve produced a variety of animated explainers for our clients, most recently for JSI’s “My Village, My Home” project and their Dose Per Container Partnership. Both projects aim to increase vaccination rates in developing nations. Here’s three reasons why animated explainers can be a great tool for conveying complex ideas and topics in an engaging and creative way.
From teaching in Italy, to releasing The Guardians, to filming in West Africa, here’s some highlights of what we’ve been up to the last few months.
As a small production company specializing in authentic storytelling with real people, the equipment we purchase needs to work in a very specific way. Namely, it cannot get in they way of gaining access and intimacy with the people we film. This presents some unique challenges when selecting a camera package. It can’t be too large or cumbersome to set up, lest we miss an important moment or the subjects of our films get intimidated by a huge camera. Many filmmakers have successfully shot intimate stories with larger cameras, but we’ve found that we work much quicker, quieter and closer when our camera system is as unobtrusive as possible. Enter the Sony FS7.
We were approached by Architectural Digest to produce a video as part of an integrated marketing campaign for Control4, a provider of home automation systems. They wanted to tell a real story of how technology and smart design could help a family with special needs. AJ and Devin’s story fit the bill perfectly.
Think back to your favorite stories, what you remember and love about them most. In Winnie-the-Pooh, I fondly recall Pooh’s naivety and Eeyore’s persistent pessimism. As a pair, they were charming antidotes for the other’s limitations. Quirkiness and the exposure of fatal flaws are what make great on-screen moments, but it’s really action that makes character come alive. What decisions do the characters make at moments of trial that reveal something about who they are? Perhaps it even reveals something about ourselves? If you can achieve both, you’ve achieved storytelling gold. And that’s what effective nonprofit videos are all about. Below are the questions you should ask when casting good characters for your non-profit video production:
We recently produced a 3 minute animation together with our partner Joe Moccia on behalf of the Results for Development Institute. They wanted to tell the story of one of their programs, the Joint Learning Network, a platform for exchange between low & middle income countries implementing health financing reforms aimed at achieving universal health coverage. In order to communicate such a large & complicated idea in a short video, we decided to employ the medium of motion graphics animation. Below are a few tips for telling stories using motion graphics animation.
Many of our clients like to highlight stories of major donors, committed volunteers and institution-builders. Such profile videos can serve to honor service to the organization as well as provide inspiration for others to emulate that service. The video below is one of two profiles we produced for Georgetown University, which used the video to honor committed members of the business community at a fundraising event aimed to raise scholarship money. Below the video are three techniques to building a successful short profile story:
We’re often approached by non-profit organizations who say they want to produce a video about their organization but they can’t seem to answer why. It’s the main reason why we’ve recently developed a questionnaire that we bring with us on all initial client meetings. It came as a bit of a surprise to one client we’ve had for several years who looked at it and joked, “what’s this, a personality survey?” And we responded, YES! It’s a personality survey for non-profits to try to get them to articulate who they are, what their story is, what they want to achieve, and why. Below are five of the most important questions non-profit organizations should ask themselves before commencing a video production:
Our recent travels through Southeast Asia were a sensory overload of colors, sounds, smells, people, and nature we’d never seen before. The compulsion was to immediately turn the camera to every single sight, an urge that slowed as the trip progressed. In fact, our best photos and video were taken towards the end of the trip because our eye for the unique became more discerning. Our growth as storytellers has taken a similar trajectory; we’ve developed better eyes and ears for what is interesting and worth telling and more importantly, which medium is best to tell it. There’s the written word, sound, video images and still images, all mediums we employ as storytellers. Some stories call for all while others may only call for one or two mediums. But how to decide whether a story is worth making into a film or if it’s better as an article or a photo? Below are a few questions I ask myself before I decide to start making a film.
Last evening we decided to try our hands at some time lapse photography. We want to have at least a few scenes in the final film that are time lapse photography, to serve as interesting transitions. Time lapse photography involves taking a series of still photographs of an event over […]