The Four P’s:
People: Who is in the story you’re trying to tell? Who will captivate your viewers? Who will they root for?
Place: Where does the story take place? What do your locations add to your characters or story?
Plot: What is the conflict, and what is the journey? How will we intrique the audience through the beginning, middle, and end?
Purpose: Why are you telling this story in the first place? Who cares? Why should they care?
How this series came about…
Sometimes a new friend can completely change your life.
When we were just a little baby of a company — making wedding films and slowly but surely learning the power of putting story first, we never would have imagined how much our Vimeo account would do for us.
While it was most likely fate that led the NFL to press play on JC & Esther’s wedding film, it was our new relationship with Vimeo that allowed us to put that film (and our company) out there for the world to see.
The NFL liked JC & Esther’s wedding film so much that they gave us a phone call that would and opened up a world of new connections and opportunities. A week later, we were on a football field in front of 70,000 fans, ready to approach the biggest shoot of our lives, all while using the very same techniques we used to tell JC & Esther’s story. Those were the storytelling techniques that put us on that field in the first place, and today we believe in them more than ever.
So when Vimeo approached us to do a guest professorship and put together a series of educational videos for their video school, we didn’t hesitate at the opportunity to share those techniques with you.
When we sat down to think about what topic we could create a feature training series for, we knew there was only one real option…
Storytelling.
We’d do a series on putting Story First.
That’s the heart of what we feel we do best – and what we’ve been told we do uniquely in many cases.
Our goal with this new series is to completely transform the way you tell stories from this day forward. To do that, we’ll be focusing almost exclusively on pre-production, planning, and the storytelling principles that guide our decision making process.
What to expect:
Over the next two weeks, we’ll be releasing four 10-12 minute videos covering what we believe to be the most important aspects of the storytelling process.
This is the process that allows us to stay one step ahead of the game, and allows us to tell deeper stories in the end. We want this series to change the way you approach pre-production, because we’ve experienced the major benefits of effective pre-production first-hand.
Over the next two weeks, here’s what you see coming from Vimeo Video School:
Episode 1 (now live!) – Stillmotion’s “Four P’s” of Story.
Episode 2 – Research and developing keywords – using those keywords to choose our characters, location, and journey/conflict.
Episode 3 – Storyboarding, shotlisting, scheduling, selecting proper gear, and the day of the big shoot.
Episode 4 – We’ll show you how we bring all of these lessons together by walking you through our shoot with Coava Coffee Roasters here in Portland, Oregon!
But wait, there’s more…
At the end of the series we’ll propose a storytelling challenge to YOU — you know how much we love fun challenges and competitions!
You’ll compete along with all of the Vimeo community to win some cool prizes (and the fame and fortune that comes with it ;)
All entries will be posted to a Vimeo group, and Vimeo will be choosing 10 finalist. A panel of people from Cinevate (with the aid of us) will finalize the three ultimate winners.
And thanks to our friends at Cinevate, you could win some awesome prizes that will help you tell many stories to come:
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