Storytelling in Video: A Person Who Wants Something Badly

Storytelling is the most invoked and least applied idea in commercial video. The word appears in nearly every brief and the resulting pieces overwhelmingly contain no story, because a story has a specific structural requirement that most corporate content does not meet.

The requirement is simple to state and awkward to satisfy: somebody wants something and cannot easily have it.

Without an Obstacle There Is No Story

Every narrative structure that has ever been described reduces to that. A person with a want, something in the way, and what happens as a result.

Corporate video habitually removes the middle element. It presents a capable organisation, a working solution and a satisfied outcome — and produces something that is informative, well made and inert, because there was never any doubt.

The test is worth applying literally to any brief that mentions storytelling. Who wants something. What is stopping them. If either answer is absent, the piece is information rather than a story, and it should be built as clear information instead of as a narrative with the tension removed.

Not Everything Should Be a Story

This deserves stating plainly, because the reflex to narrativise everything wastes production budget.

A demonstration should demonstrate. A tutorial should teach in order. A specification should be legible. A reference video should be navigable. Each of those is better served by clarity and structure than by a narrative frame, and imposing one on them adds length without adding value.

Story is the right tool where the audience has to care rather than merely understand, and where they have no existing reason to.

Start Late

The most consistent structural error in unsuccessful video is starting at the beginning.

Background, history, credentials and context are what a piece has ready and what an audience will not wait for. The material that holds attention is the difficulty, and the workable structure begins inside it — the problem already happening, the person already stuck — with context supplied later and only where it is needed to understand what is at stake.

The same principle governs endings. A story ends when the outcome is clear, and a summary after it is an epilogue nobody needed.

Specificity Is What Makes It Credible

The single largest difference between a story that works and one that does not is the level of detail.

“We wanted to improve efficiency” is a category. “We were doing this by hand, at night, on paper, and it took four people” is a story. The second is believable precisely because it is specific enough to be checkable, and the specificity is what produces the recognition an audience needs to care.

That has an interviewing consequence. The generic answer is the first answer, and the specific one arrives after a follow-up question — what exactly, when, who, what happened next. A piece that used the first answers from every contributor is a piece assembled from categories.

Structures That Work in Short Form

Commercial video is short, and a handful of structures fit reliably.

Problem, attempt, outcome. The plainest available and adequate for most purposes, provided the problem is genuinely presented as a problem.

A single person’s account. One contributor with a specific experience, told chronologically. It works because identification with a person is immediate and requires no setup.

Before and after, with the middle shown. The version that works includes the difficulty of the middle; the version that fails cuts from before to after and asserts the change.

A question and its investigation. Useful for explanatory and documentary work, because the question creates the incompleteness that keeps a viewer present.

Process as narrative. Following something being made or done from start to finish, where the obstacles are the real ones the work contains.

Sound Carries More Than People Expect

The elements that make a story land are frequently not visual.

Sound establishes place and emotional register faster than an image does, and silence is the most underused device available — a pause after a difficult sentence does more than any music cue.

Music that supports rather than instructs is the distinction. A track that tells the audience what to feel about something they have not yet been shown is doing the piece’s work badly and audibly.

The other half is the image being specific rather than general. A named object, a person’s hands doing the actual task, the real room rather than a stock equivalent. Generic footage of professional-looking people communicates nothing, however well shot.

The Honest Constraints in Commercial Work

Two limits shape what is possible.

Clients are reluctant to present difficulty. A story requires acknowledging that something was hard, went wrong, or was unresolved, and organisations are cautious about that. It is also what makes the piece credible, and persuading a client of that is part of the work.

Real people are not performers. The account has to be true and the person telling it is not an actor, which means the material comes from interviewing well rather than from writing well.

This reference publishes no figures or formulas. What is checkable instead is the brief itself: it either names a person, a want and an obstacle, or it does not. A brief that cannot answer those three questions is describing information, and the honest response is to build it as information.