“The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So, write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.”
What is Your Voice?
sharing stories in an authentic way that captures audiences
We can’t tell stories unless we have a voice to lead us. Everyone has their own unique voice and it’s our job to understand what that is and how to best share that with our audiences. When we put this at the top of our priorities when it comes to filmmaking, we believe that it will lead to more authentic representations of our subjects and their stories.
When we have determined the right voice and the right story, we continue our focus to include engagement – that is to reach our audience with content that is intriguing, provocative, authentic, and most importantly, engaging. The content should be very narrow in scope – that is, we will not overwhelm our audience with tons of details, but will tell very small stories with which the viewer can relate. When we have engaged the viewer, we can then direct them into the stream of additional material (which already exists) that will provide specific information.
Stories lodge and live in the memory far longer and more vividly than facts and numbers.
When each story is narrow in scope, we need to reach our audience with frequency. Any one story will not, of course, answer all questions, but taken together can paint a broad picture.
Character creates empathy.
The most powerful weapon in our bag is empathy. Create a character that engages the audience and creates a sense of empathy. With that connection, our viewer will engage, learn, become immersed, and (hopefully) be moved to action. If your target audience does not sense a mutual humanity between themselves and your story’s core character, they will not care, not listen, not identify, not be moved to act. Empathy is king. Audience involvement hinges on an act of personal identification. Furthermore, what the consumer needs is a human affinity, not a surface or a clichéd affinity.
Be specific to increase universal appeal.
Creatives hoping for a broad audience tend to generalize, opting for a one size fits all, rather than a one-of-a-kind world. This unfortunate step actually shrinks, rather than expands, their audience. The weakest choice of subject matter favors the general rather than the specific. The more specific these three choices, the more universal the appeal.
The Process of Discovering and Sharing Your Voice
HOW WE developed a tv campaign for goodwin college that focused on each INDIVIDUAL’S story
A voice is the key guide to developing our visual stories. Our process began with several conversations with recent graduates who represented a variety of backgrounds. Through audio recordings of these conversations, we were able to identify the strongest voices and develop a narrative structure. Following client approval of the narrative, a shot list was created, then locations and additional talent were secured.
The visual approach we took with this campaign series was to reduce the number of shots to put more emphasis on what is being said off camera. By utilizing longer shots and video portraits, we could create a moment that the audience would take their time to experience and not be overloaded with too many different images. Each scene was developed based on our earlier conversations with the subjects, who each worked with us and confirmed that what we were going to film was authentic and genuine to their actual experiences.
When it comes time for final assembly editing, the feedback process was much shorter because everyone had already agreed on the overall vision. We consider this entire process from pre-production to post-production to be purposeful filmmaking because we constructed the stories from the inside out through discovering who each individual was and what they had to say. We were also able to create several TV spots while responsibly managing resources and the client’s budget. Our ultimate goal is to tell stories in a genuine and honest manner to our subjects and through this process we could accomplish that.