This is Great Big Story. A global media company driven by digital storytelling. What makes these stories so great? Great Big focuses on stories from people that the audience may never have heard from before. They go place that the audience may never have been before. They take this vast world and make it smaller, one short film at a time. Since their debut in 2015, Great Big has picked up an audience of just over 10 million people on a variety of viewing platforms. In total, they have received over 2 billion views worldwide, and that number keeps growing with each new video released. And if that’s not enough, each video receives an average of 1.1 million views. But what has earned them so many views and dedicated fans? Great Big finds uniquely interesting stories about people and places on earth then present them in an easy to consume short video with cinema quality production.
Great Big categorizes their videos into five topics; human condition, frontiers, planet earth, flavors, and origins. Subjects of the videos range from Jacques Bailly, the official pronouncer of the Scripps National Spelling Bee and a man who can correctly pronounce every word in the English dictionary to the prehensile-tailed skink of the Solomon Islands which is on the verge of extinction due to deforestation. My most recently viewed video was a four-part video with four stories from people with really cool jobs. The first part is about a professional golf ball diver in the state of Florida, for 50 years Gordon Davis has dove in ponds across Florida to collect the golf balls lost to the hazard. The second part, about Keanon Kyles who works full time as a janitor as well as a professional Opera singer and he is preparing to take the lead role in an Opera in Scotland. Swayze Valentine is the subject of the third part, and she is the first and only female cut woman in the UFC. And finally, the fourth part is about Kristen Finley who ran away and joined the circus as a trapeze artist.
This video was released on Labor Day of this year with the title “Four Stories About Cool Jobs (We Promise)” and falls into the human condition category. These are my personal favorites because I feel as humans we are able to do some really amazing things, and really unique things that not everyone can do. All four of the jobs in that video are amazing and something I couldn’t ever do. Each portion of the video is comprised of a talking head style interview shot mixed with footage of them actually doing their jobs. This set up of a video is simple and sleek but the topic itself is what truly draws in the viewers. Each story in the video is less than three minutes in length making it perfectly shareable on Facebook and perfectly consumable on Snapchat.
All 1,650 videos, and counting, that Great Big has made, draw on deeper human desires such as connection, curiosity, and knowledge. Humans are herd mammals, in that we want to be around other humans. Mix that with our curiosity for the bizarre and ever-present crusade for knowledge and you have a Human Condition video. Take our curiosity and throw in a dash of adventure and you have Planet Earth videos. Know that people as a species are always wanting to learn, whether they admit it or not, and you have the knowledge that people will watch these videos. Like I said, Two. Billion. Views. But couldn’t any old schmuck make a video about what was happening in the world? Sure, but a Great Big story stands out from the crowd. As in no two videos are the same, from a production standpoint. Human Condition stories draw on an individual’s humor and might have a few quirky animations. While Frontiers and Planet Earth stories hold a cinematic quality near Hollywood standards. Achieved through smooth drone shots gliding over beyond picturesque landscapes to GoPro footage of jumping off a mountain.
However, what makes Great Big truly unique is the fact that this could only happen now. Each video released on average is 2–3 minutes and occasionally grouped with similar videos to create one with a 15-minute run time. These short videos couldn’t live anywhere else than the digital era. In the time of broadcast television, every program was 30 minutes or an hour. Nothing less. But today we have many platforms in which to watch something shorter than 10 minutes. From their original release platform of YouTube to Facebook and Twitter to even Snapchat. What Great Big did was notice that people watch short videos, something that won’t take up their time or require a lot of investment. People will watch a two-minute video about an unknown animal, but they wouldn’t watch a full-length documentary. They noticed that the strange and the bizarre stories were being liked and shared. Great Big took our inner desires, paired with our need for instant information and released it on our quick media platforms to create a global phenomenon viewed in over 95 countries worldwide.
