Just a quick note about this, since honestly, you should just watch it anyway for an inside look at the outbreak on the ground. But since I’m preparing for coaching at Mountain Workshops next week, I’ve got my educator hat on and wanted to point out something I think this video does really well, that is often a challenge for “issue” based video storytelling. So often video storytellers fall short of making a compelling piece because they follow a person who tells us about the work that’s being done: the leader of an organization, an expert on the topic, etc. This happens for two main reasons:
1) It’s easier to get the story “gatekeeper” to be the story subject: they know a lot, they’re often eager to help, and they’re available.
2) The storyteller (or client or editor) wants to be sure they tell the whole story by showing lots of examples, so they rely on an expert or organization coordinator to tie together examples of many people affected by the issue.
This is almost never a successful formula for a compelling story with great impact.
In this piece, New York Times video journalist Ben C. Solomon, crafts a compelling story that manages to show the chaos and reach of the epidemic, by following one ambulance driver. The story doesn’t rely on an outside voice to explain the severity of the situation. It draws us in to the panic and hopelessness felt by one man. We can connect to that. We get that. And that’s why it works.
Watch the video here: Times Video