Worship Video Tutorial: Visual Storytelling

Another great article / tutorial from Church Production on how to engage, entertain and inspire your audience. Producing worship videos and live streaming your services are both great ways to expand your reach and your message. The more compelling your worship videos are, the better your storytelling is, and the more you engage your viewers will result in larger audiences and having a deeper impact on your community.

Church Production by Jeff Chaves

Whether viewing on a smart phone or an IMAG screen, an understanding of visual storytelling can help promote deeper engagement with your viewer.

The art of visual storytelling is using images to covey a certain message. It's important to understand what our images say to the people who view them. This is as true in creating a film as it is on the big screen on Sunday morning. Using the wrong framing, angle or lighting can actually send the wrong message. The key to learning visual storytelling is to observe how it is being done all around you. Think about the images you see every day. What does that shot communicate? What do I think when I see a really tight shot on someone's face? What do I think about the person who is too dark in an image? The Elements of a Story First, let's understand what makes a good story. Every story, whether visual or not, has to contain several elements or its not a story. A story needs a main character, preferably someone we care about and trust. Next, that character needs to have some kind of problem or conflict. Finally there has to be a resolution of that problem. This story arc, as it is called, was discovered by Aristotle thousand of years ago. The professional visual storytellers in Hollywood have been using this concept since the silent movie days. The storyteller's art is found in how we come to care about the main character and are drawn into the conflict. For example, early in the first Star Wars movie (the 1977 version), you begin to genuinely care about Luke Skywalker. George Lucas, the movie's writer and director, kept us engaged with his quest. Partially, this was done with great visual storytelling. Luke was in his white clothes and Darth Vader, the protagonist, all in black. Even the bright planet of Tatooine was set against the blackness of the Empire's spacecraft you know clearly who is the hero and who is the villain of the story. read more...