What is Visual Storytelling ?
Visual storytelling uses graphic design, infographics, illustration, and photography to convey information in the most elegant, entertaining, and informative way. Today, the creative scope of existing visual storytelling techniques is being expanded to meet the formidable challenge of extracting valuable news, surprising findings, and relevant stories from a daily flood of data head on.
The power of visual storytelling
We’ve all seen the statistics, and there’s no doubt that content marketing is vastly more effective when images or video are added.
Brands that use visual content have found that it encourages greater engagement with their customers. This is very understandable, as visual storytelling is something that goes back to caveman days. Visuals help us tell our stories quickly with impact and emotion. But they have to be the right visuals. And when the visual is a powerful one, be it an image or video, the effect is magnified.
Powerful visuals + evoke emotions = Deeper engagement
Powerful visuals evoke emotions, driving a deeper engagement and more profound change in behavior. So what makes an image or video powerful, so it causes an emotional reaction and encourages this deeper level of engagement that a content marketer needs to be successful?
At Getty Images, we spend a great deal of time asking ourselves - what makes a powerful visual?
Of course the craft of the image matters – composition, lighting, style etc. But there are other factors that might not be so obvious and perhaps most people never think about.
Four factors that make a powerful visual:
1. Authenticity
The consumer wants to believe that the people they are seeing are real… what they’re doing and how they’re acting is real. A nice example of this is the realness of Jennifer Lawrence - which fans of the Oscars loved - versus the varnished, old-Hollywood look and feel of Anne Hathaway. This real-world trend shows up in our subject-based archive as well.
At Getty Images, we've seen this trend play out with a change in the type of imagery we've been selling over the past five years. Our most popular 2007 baby versus 2012 baby shows the latter is clearly more candid. It’s not the perfect moment, but it is a real moment. And our 2007 womanversus 2012 woman shows quite a change, not just in her look, but in her attitude.
This is the kind of change we’ve seen in just five years. The visual language changes faster today than ever before thanks to YouTube, Instagram and Facebook – we can no longer think in decades – i.e. The 50’s housewife, the 80’s business man. You have to keep up or you will seem dated.
Dove is an example of a marketer that has nailed authenticity and benefitted from it. H&M is another example, with the use of Jennie Runk, the plus-size model to demonstrate the range of sizes in its beachwear campaign. And MasterCard – real people, real moments. The hair isn’t perfect, the lighting isn’t perfect. But it works.
2. Cultural Relevancy
Diversity and inclusiveness are issues that are very culturally relevant today. Of course not everybody is on board with these or any social shifts, but if you’re a content marketer it’s usually good business not to be stuck in the past.
Even mainstream advertisers like Cheerios are willing to accept any negative reactions to achieve a deeper emotional connection. One of the more high-profile reactions to the commercial and the backlash was a customer-created Tumblr to highlight a more positive, authentic view of mixed-race families. That risk is clearly worth it when you create this kind of relationship with the consumer. It’s also not surprising that cultural relevancy and authenticity go hand in hand.
3. Sensory Currency
This is a very strong trend right now. As technology takes over more and more of our lives, we’ve seen a desire for things that are ‘real’ like human contact and old-time, hands-on activities and professions. This trend combines nostalgia and a new appreciation for traditional skills, and seeing handmade products re-establishes the connection between maker and consumer.
4. Classic Storytelling Archetypes
Archetypes are classic characters that have been used to tell stories for hundreds, if not thousands of years - and the 12 classic archetypes are still just as powerful of a storytelling tool today.
Examples we see quite often are the hero archetype and more specifically, a Goddess of the Hunt. Recent cultural examples of this include The Hunger Games, or Disney's Brave.
And then there’s the caregiver. Quite often the caregiver archetype today isn’t a woman at all, but the father as seen in this advertisement for Chase Private Client. This is quite a shift socially – another example of cultural relevance.
Key takeaways
Powerful visuals evoke deeper emotions and result in a deeper engagement with your content. That’s why as a content marketer, knowing how to identify emotionally powerful images is so important. Content marketing is about telling a story and creating a closer connection to the consumer, and powerful visuals, whether they’re still images or video, make that easier and more effective.
FOUR KEY FACTORS FOR POWERFUL VISUALS:
- Use authentic visuals
- Be culturally relevant to your audience
- Use visuals that reflect the human experience
- Use visual storytelling tools like archetypal characters
To browse a selection of images which reflect the four key factors for powerful visuals,click here
Watch Getty Images' Senior Creative Planning Manager, Pamela Grossman describe the four key factors for visual storytelling at the 2013 Newscred Content Marketing summit here.
10 rules of visual storytelling
Rule 1: Include basic factual details as needed for credibility. These might appear at the end of a linear presentation (video or animation), or below or beside a still image or graphic.
Another basic difference between journalism and art is literal truth. Whether the camera is shooting video or stills, the journalist behind the camera must not direct. As soon as you tell people what to do, you’ve changed the scene from fact to fiction. Portraits are the exception; they usually require some direction from the photographer.
Rule 2: Any reasonable assumption a viewer would make must be true. When we see a portrait, we assume it was posed. When we see someone jumping, falling, or raising a flag, we do not assume it was a re-enactment.
Where does the storytelling come in? It is possible for one image to tell a story, but it may be useful to think of the single image as an iconic work (think of the World Trade Center with dark smoke billowing, or Eddie Adams’s famous image in which a Vietnamese general shoots a man in the head) — a symbol, a condensation of meaning. A child who sees Adams’s photo today sees only one man shooting another — not the whole long tragedy of the Vietnam War.
Rule 3: A visual story requires more than one image.
In his chapter about photo stories, Ken Kobré wrote: “How does a picture story differ from a collection of pictures on a topic? A picture story has a theme. Not only are the individual pictures in the story about one subject, but they also help to support one central point” (Photojournalism: The Professionals’ Approach, 6th ed., page 232).
Like Kobré, I encourage students to write a headline for their visual story even before they go out to shoot. I go further and urge them to include a subject, active verb, and object in their working headline. “Scenes from the life of a medical student” is too vague to make a good story. “Medical student confronts all-night cram sessions, microscopes, and corpses” assures me that this story has a chanceto be interesting.
Rule 4: Know what the story is before you start making images for it.
Visual stories can transport us — not only to another place, but inside another person’s life.
Visual stories often leave out a lot. This is part of their power, part of what makes them so effective. The best visual stories are compact, visceral, evocative.
Visual stories should be able to stand alone and make sense on their own. That does not mean they must be complete. I think this is one of the hardest things for journalism students to negotiate. If they try to cram in too much information, the visual story stalls, dragged down by the weight. If they fail to supply sufficient information and context, the story floats loose, inconsequential, pretty but meaningless.
Rule 5: Edit ruthlessly to pare away all that is unnecessary to the essential story.Background and context can be supplied in a linked text, in other separate components.
Rule 6: Ensure that the story makes sense if it stands alone. This does not mean it has to tell everything or “show both sides.” (I put that in quotes because it’s a huge fallacy to assume there are only two sides.)
Sometimes a visual story needs illustrations, charts or graphs, maps, diagrams. One of my favorite examples of great visual storytelling is a story from National Geographic and MediaStorm that integrates still photography, video, and information graphics in a tightly edited video format: Ivory Wars: Last Stand in Zakouma. Specifically I recommend the animated map sequence that starts at about 5:33. I think you will realize this as the map animation progresses: Nothing else, in any format, would tell this segment of the story as effectively.
Telling a story entirely with graphics is different from telling a story with photos or video. This too can be journalism.
Rule 7: A visual story does not require a camera.
When I was watching a 25-minute news program a few days ago, I experienced a small moment of sheer delight that was purely visual. It keeps coming back to me. The reason the three-shot video sequence was so successful was because first it showed me something appealing (a child’s face, at 14:25), and then a fuller view of something that seemed very familiar (a kiddie Ferris wheel, at 14:30), and then it surprised me by showing something unexpected about the same subject in the previous two shots (at 14:35).
Recently I watched the film The Story of the Weeping Camel, and I noticed how often a new sequence started by showing a close-up of someone’s hands or feet (or even an extreme close-up of a face) before cutting to a wider shot that revealed what was going on. In a quiet story set in a remote rural area, where not much happens, this technique worked really well to hold my attention.
Rule 8: Show things the viewer has not seen before, or show things in a way that is unfamiliar to the viewer.
Rule 9: Keep changing what the viewer is seeing. The visual brain will become bored if the image stays the same. Vary the angle and the distance — especially if the subject remains the same!
Finally, what makes a story a story? It has to move along an arc. If it’s flat — if it’s just a sequence of images and/or facts and/or events — it does not have the shape of a story. The shape is a mountain on which we travel upwards. The storyteller conveys us up that mountain, and when we reach the top, there has to be something there for us that made the journey worthwhile.
Ira Glass calls this the moment of reflection — when we stand on top of the mountain and see something.
For me, this is a hell of a lot more helpful than telling students their stories need to have a beginning, middle, and end. What does that mean? Every person’s day has a beginning, middle, and end — that doesn’t mean there’s a story in it!
The story must start with something (a strong visual) that makes us want to go up the hill. That’s the open. Then the story must hold on to us to keep us moving up, up, up (see Rule 9, above). Ira Glass says we do this by raising questions and answering them, one after another, until we reach the top. This question-and-answer process can be done visually: Show us something that’s not usual or typical (question; see Rule 8, above) and then show us a fuller or more complete version (answer). For video, the Five Shot Method provides a template.
The top of the mountain is the climax of the story — but it’s not the end. Don’t cut us off suddenly — don’t throw us off the summit! Make sure you leave us with a sense of satisfaction, a feeling of conclusion. Bring it to a point. The closing image should make us feel like we have really reached an ending. It can give us hope, or it can convey a sense of hopelessness. It can make us feel like this story continues, or the chapter is closed. It should leave us with a feeling of some kind.
Rule 10: Tie a single string from the beginning to the end. Pull it taut and high just before the end. Then release gently, stopping at the firm final knot.
