Visual Storytelling
One of the most famous paintings in the world appeals to our senses making it both accessible and immensely popular. Botticelli demonstrates visual storytelling at its best. Now technology allows us all to be visual storytellers. Don’t be intimidated by the painting…It’s here to show you how powerful our visceral reaction can be to a visual story.
Visual communication is taking over in powerful and impactful ways. Now the world expects more from you than just being a good writer. STORY: the art of standing out distills visual storytelling advice from an advertising executive, filmmaker, videographer and social media and digital strategy experts to teach you how to get your message across to achieve your desired outcomes.
Research on Twitter use shows that images and GIFs (graphics interchange format — a series of images or video clips that run over and over again) are 94 percent more likely to be retweeted than tweets without images. “The story of the present and near-future of social media is visual content,” writes Dan Zarella, social media scientist. Visuals — images, videos, infographics, and GIFs — allow us to take in content at a much higher speed than reading text.
Research conducted by 3M shows that “visuals are processed sixty thousand times faster than text, which means you can paint a picture for your audience much faster with an actual picture.”
Other stats on how we process information include:
- 90 percent of information sent to the brain is visual
- 20 percent of text is what the average person reads on a web page
- 80 percent of information is retained by people if the information is visual as opposed to 20 percent if read and 10 percent if heard.
- 65 percent of people are visual learners
Humans have been using pictures to communicate since 30,000 BC, when cave paintings were used to share information. Petroglyphs, or carvings into rock, appeared around 10,000 BC and depicted a single event in time. Then Pictograms, pictures telling a chronological story, were used around 9,000 BC. Communication evolved to include Ideograms, graphic symbols representing an idea, and ultimately to a form of writing (4,000 BC), with the alphabet dating back to 2,000 BC.
“More than 50 percent of the cortex, the surface of the brain, is devoted to processing visual information,” says David Williams, current director of the Center for Visual Science at University of Rochester. “Understanding how vision works may be the key to understanding how the brain works as a whole.”
Just ask Ted Nelson, founder of Gumbo Marketing about the power of visual storytelling. His client, Chef Blake Hartwick, accrued a huge following when Ted started videotaping him making his “winning wings” for the Carolina Panthers games for his friends and family.
The more the Panthers won, the more fans and food lovers wanted to view the videos Ted made. Hartwick’s audience couldn’t get enough of the Winning Wings videos. Then the Panthers made it into the 2016 Super Bowl! Chef Blake was invited to cook at Super Bowl 50 at the Annual Taste of the NFL Party with a Purpose, a culinary fundraiser.
Ted said, “There’s no older or less unique way to present. The press release is as old as sponsored content. We just had this particular video to tell the story with better tools. It was more relevant and meaningful. You had to watch it happen and see it! You could never get that without the video. The result was massive coverage for the chef. This is an example that would’ve been done an old way before but done in a new and better way.”
Justin Gutwein, filmmaker and video strategist from InMyTree Filmworks, chuckles when he remembers getting requests from clients who didn’t have a lot of funding when they told him they didn’t need a ten-minute video. A thirty or sixty-second video would be fine with them. “What people don’t know,” Justin said, “is the shorter the video the harder it is to make because a lot more process goes into it to distill your message to sixty seconds.” Given how gatekeepers are pressed for time, coming up with a distilled message in a short, engaging video is going to make much more of an impact than a twenty-minute rambling piece.
Check out a short trailer from Justin’s Startupland film:
The barrier of entry to making video is “in your pocket,” according to Justin, especially with the availability of the new 4K60p phones. The biggest issue now is with audio quality, but there are ways to get around that. You can buy accessories and connectors that allow you to unlock auto mode, which is the mode your iPhone defaults to all. Once you get out of auto mode, you can change the exposure. The movie Tangerine that was shown at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival was shot entirely with three iPhone 5s.
Video specs are changing fast and will continue to change. If your lighting or audio are not great, it’s not a big deal. “Your presentation and the way you convey information is far more important than your tech ability. We see that with low budget films…where the light and audio weren’t great but man that was a great film,” muses Justin when emphasizing what he thinks is most important to the visual storytelling process — the art of it all.
I hope you enjoyed this post — if you want to connect, you can reach me here via email Kimberlya.norton@gmail.com or connect with me on social: LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. Also, you can find my book, STORY: the art of standing out on Amazon — here is the link to buy it: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07H94D3L1
