Flexibility A Key Storytelling Trait

fat sick nearly dead

Courtesy: imdb.com

I watched a pretty cool movie over the weekend, and it illustrated something important for anyone producing corporate videos. Keeping an open mind is crucial to storytelling.

The movie I saw was Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead. It’s all about nutrition and changing the way we eat. The material is interesting, the story is well-told and it’s worthwhile watching. The trailer and full movie are below.

Alright, spoiler alert… I’m going to give away a surprise in the movie, so if you’re genuinely interested in seeing it… bookmark this post and come back to read it later.

About the movie

Okay, the movie is billed as the story of Joe Cross… an Australian man who’s 100-pounds overweight, suffering from an autoimmune disease and ready to make a big life-change. That is indeed what the movie is about, but there’s a story that overtakes it. Along the way on Joe’s journey, he runs into a truck driver in worse shape than him. Joe offers his help, and low and behold the trucker calls him out of the blue one day asking to take him up on it.

What’s remarkable about this is that the phone call appears to come at the end of Joe’s adventure. I can just imagine the production meeting after that phone call. Here they are at the end of the production and what could be an even better story has been gift-wrapped for them.

Joe’s story is good and he’s a likeable guy, but the transformation that follows with the truck driver is nothing short of extraordinary. It clearly added several months to the production and I’m sure more expense as well.

Takeaway

Joe and the production team deserve a lot of credit. It would have been easy for them to ignore the truck driver’s story and make the movie they set-out to make… all focused on Joe and his journey. What they seemingly did was make a tough call and it paid-off BIGTIME!

This isn’t a unique situation. The same thing happens during all sorts of corporate video productions. The hard thing is standing up and telling either your client or boss… there’s a better story here. I know we made plans to do one thing, but we’ve found something better. You might get some push-back and ultimately they’re the ones making the call, but you owe it to them to give your professional opinion.

You should want to tell the best story possible, even if that wasn’t the story you set-out to tell.

–Tony Gnau

Tony Gnau is a three-time Emmy-winning journalist. He is also the founder and chief storytelling officer at T60 Productions. T60 has won 11 Telly Awards for its work over the last eight years.

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