Can you tell a story with just a visual — without words? Of course. I’ve written about visual storytelling in art frequently in this space. I’m not sure, though, if I’ve written about visual storytelling on video that attempts to tell a story without narration or dialogue.
Two bloggers have recently explored that question. In an entry on 10,000 Words, How to create video storytelling that actually tells a story, Mark S. Luckie presents three videos that, he says, “prove that you don’t have to have clip after clip of an interviewee of telling the story for you — sometimes the story just tells itself.”
Escape From Tomorrow (A Day In the Life With Nigel Sylvester) from 13thWitness™ on Vimeo.
Story fares a bit better in the videos examined by Tom Kennedy on Kennedy | Multimedia. Kennedy notes that “visual storytelling can offer a complete narrative with music and images alone” and gives as examples four TV commercials, one of which has been removed from YouTube for terms-of-use violations. The first of these, an ad for a Volkswagen, and the last, an ad for Mini Cooper, decently tell stories. The third, an ad for Mexican beer, isn’t much of a story, in my opinion.
The line of inquiry is fascinating, though, and it makes me wonder what elements are required to create a video that offers a complete narrative with music and images alone, and what are some good examples of these?
I just used the postsecret and the bike example for a Digital Storytelling workshop (presentation is here: http://www.thiswomanswork.com/digitalstorytelling Your listed as a resource! Love this blog!)
I used different stories to illustrate the Seven Elements because they were kind of extreme examples of each idea. At the end of the workshop, we looked at some of these less obvious stories to see if we could overlay Jason Ohler’s version of Visual Portrait of a Story and we felt like we could although more so for the bike video than Post Secret.
I’m a writer (not a techie) with a strong personal interest in narrative and in stretchy my ideas about narrative so it was really fun to listen in on what the class had to say. There were diverse takes on all of the videos and I’m looking forward to offering the workshop again and seeing what the next group has to say!
Thanks so much for stopping by and commenting, Dawn. I’m looking forward to looking at your materials and learning more about the Seven Elements and Visual Portrait of a Story. Thanks for the kind words about the blog.