Celebrating National Storytelling week – February 4, 2020
Take the subject of history. According to Wikipedia, “History is the past as it is described in written documents and the study thereof. In Middle English, the meaning of history was “story” in general”. Stories from the past inform our present and our future; our influence and learning tool left to us as a legacy from past generations. And we pride ourselves on handing on a legacy of knowledge through our bodies of work and stories we hand down to our interns and trainees, our children and our friends.
The importance of reading our children a bedtime story has never been underestimated. It clearly gives us a love of reading and listening to new stories as we grow into adults – often teaching us lessons in life in an infinite number of ways, making us more knowledgeable, more aware, more sensitive and more caring and compassionate - just as our fairy tales and pictures books showed us about good and bad behaviour, gave us a sense of our cultural history and began the formation of personal values when we were children.
Story telling has earned its place as the most important tradition humans process.
The best businesses and business ideas are guided by people who have worked out their story. Knowing the reason “why” you want to tell a story, “to whom” and “why now” gives us the narrative. It gives the new storyteller the very best motivation and ability to tell a confident story – to pass it on - to engage its audience and get the idea off the ground. And to hit the brief fairly and squarely on the head.
The extraordinary growth of social media and shorter attention spans mean that durations of videos have become shorter and shorter, so the ability to pin-point the USP is crucial: An easy (ish) task with a half hour or even fifty-minute documentary, but a social media sting at six seconds needs minute precision otherwise the story is lost.
And that’s why Walk Tall Media has its strap line “Narrative is at the heart of everything we do.” We believe that telling a good story on video – as in every other format – relies on working out the narrative first. Sometimes we have the “whys” presented very clearly and sometimes we can ask the right questions to help this happen. But knowing the reasons behind your decisions really helps us clearly convey messages to others to promote businesses, products, events, ideas and dreams. After all PLATO tells us that “Those who tell stories rule society,” so it’s in all our interests to tell a good one!
Jacqui Doughty, Owner
BAFTA nominated for children’s documentaries and maker of corporate and promotional videos of all shapes and sizes.
