Roger Ebert in a recent post with this video asked, “Are social media creating something wonderful for the human race? Or are they the first step toward the formation of a Hive Mind?”

Well Roger, we come down on the side of Awesome, Inspiring and Revolutionary in the possibilities for business – and clearly beyond – to engage, motivate, and build awareness and communities. Our guess is the Mubarak’s of the world are likely feeling a bit differently these days, and fall on the side of Frightening. You? How do you see them changing your life? Your business or organization?

According to Eisenstein, there are five METHODS OF MONTAGE.

1.Metric: Basic cutting from one moment to the next (based purely on the physical nature of time) no matter what is happening in the image.
2.Rhythmic: Cutting based on time, but using the visual composition of the shots — along with a change in the speed of the metric cuts — to induce more complex meanings than what is possible with metric montage. It’s about how the movement in one image affects the movement of the next. Here, movement takes precedence over length. Once sound was introduced, rhythmic montage also included audial elements (music, dialogue, sounds). The most famous use of Rhythmic Montage is the climax to “The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly”. Watch Clint Eastwood’s eyes move back and forth, dictating where the shot cuts to next. Watch Lee Van Cleef’s fingers inch closer and closer to his gun, dictating a cut back to Eastwood’s reacting eyes.
3.Tonal: Cutting based on the emotional meaning of the shots – not just manipulating the temporal length of the cuts or its rhythmic characteristics — to elicit a reaction from the audience even more complex than from the metric or rhythmic montage. For example, a sleeping baby would emote calmness and relaxation. At first, this method may seem to fly in the face of Soviet Montage Theory, given that it acknowledges the possibility of individual meaning within the shot, outside of the cut. But the idea here is that you can create a stronger meaning by cutting images together with the same or conflicting tones. Imagine a scene in which you cut between a loud, crazy party on the first floor of a house and the quiet, secluded loneliness of a boy in his room upstairs. Two shots with two tones cut together to create a third tone/meaning.
4.Overtonal: Combining Metric, Rhythmic and Tonal cutting together creates Overtonal Montage. It took me a while to understand the difference between Overtonal and Tonal, and I’m not sure I fully get it yet, but I believe Overtonal Montage simply stands for the feeling the viewer has after watching the film. A writing analogy would probably be the “Spine” of a story. Yes, there are beats (metric), there are scenes (rhythmic) and there are sequences (tonal), but put them all together and you have your Spine (overtonal).
5.Intellectual: When done correctly, Intellectual Montage might be the most exciting form of cutting. This method is the END ALL, BE ALL of Soviet Montage Theory – cutting two images together to create a third meaning. The most famous use of this method may also be the single most famous cut in cinema history: when the ape throws up a bone in “2001: A Space Odyssey”, then cutting to a bone-shaped spacecraft in the distant future (idea: the dawn of man). Another example would be the intercutting of a soldier’s murder with the slaughtering of a water buffalo in “Apocalypse Now” (idea: the soldier’s life must be sacrificed for the war just as the buffalo must be sacrificed for the tribe), or the cut from Lenny Bruce’s courtroom plea to an image of his dead body at the climax of “Lenny” (idea: the court killed Lenny when they censored him).
Ever since learning about Soviet Montage Theory, I have been a huge believer in it. I even went as far as to say that the very definition of a movie is two images cut together to give a third meaning.

“The idea is in the cut!” I would say. The Soviet pioneers, along with other filmmakers such as David Mamet and Alfred Hitchcock had convinced me of this. I would quote Pudovkin: “The image itself is meaningless! The meaning is within the cut!” This made sense to me. Artistic breakthrough! I’d figured out what makes a movie a movie! Through all my independent study and reading I had discovered the essence of great visual storytelling! It’s the end-all, be-all! Surely, this is the only way one should make a movie!

But I love Quentin Tarantino. And Paul Thomas Anderson. And Martin Scorsese. These filmmakers don’t always rely on the cut. All three of these filmmakers have made a name for themselves with long, extended takes and flashy steadicam shots. Did this mean that their films were overpraised? Were they missing the point of a movie, as I had discovered it to be “within the cut”? David Mamet always spoke out against the very invention of the steadicam, arguing that it was like following around your actors, which isn’t visual storytelling.

Then I saw Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” and my world really came crashing down. The ballet scene between Chaplin and the floating globe has instantly become one of my favorite scenes in cinema history, and the CUTS MEAN NOTHING. It was all about content!

Another one of my favorite scenes in cinema history is the begging scene in Vittorio De Sica’s “Umberto D.” This scene is also all about content. The method of montage never raises beyond metric or potentially rhythmic. Why, then did I love it so much? Did I just have incredibly bad taste?

Then I remembered a quote from my favorite director of all time, Stanley Kubrick, from a rare interview taken in 1969 as he was promoting “2001”:

“I’ve always said the two people who are worthy of film study are Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles as representing the two most diverse approaches to filmmaking. Charlie Chaplin must have had the crudest, simplest lack of interest in cinematics. Just get the image on the screen; it’s the content of the shot that matters. Welles is probably, at his best, the most baroque kind of stylist in the conventional film-telling style. I think perhaps Eisenstein might be a better example because where Chaplin had all content and no style, Eisenstein had all style and no content. Alexander Nevsky stylistically is possibly one of the most beautiful movies ever made; it’s content to me is a moronic story, moronically told, full of lies. It’s the most dishonest kind of film. And I would have thought that perhaps a study of Chaplin’s greatest films and Alexander Nevsky would be worthwhile, because somewhere within that you’d see how two completely diverse approaches can make a fascinating film.” – Stanley Kubrick

And therein, in a quote from the great Kubrick himself, lies the great debate between Montage and Mise en scène!

But without cuts, where is the conflict of ideas? With intellectual montage, I can cut between a shot of ants climbing up a branch and a shot of people crossing a busy Manhattan intersection to create the third idea of “we people are just like ants.” It’s meaning is contained in the “conflict” of these two drastic images.

So where is the conflict in the scene from “The Great Dictator”? It’s within the CONTENT. Look at the content of the scene. Chaplin is playing a character based on Adolph Hitler, arguably the single most universally hated man of the 20th century. He is the very personification of evil…

… and he’s performing a ballet.

WHAM! Conflict! An evil dictator (negative element) is performing a ballet with the world (positive element) creating the third idea of “Hitler wants the whole world in his hands. He wants to become emperor of the world.”

As a filmmaker, when you are writing or directing a scene, ask yourself: What is the idea I’m trying to get across? How can I express that idea through conflict? What are my two conflicting elements/images? And then ask yourself the most important question: Is it best to represent this idea through conflict WITHIN THE CUT (Soviet Montage Theory) or WITHIN THE CONTENT (Chaplin)? One is not better than the other. The two can coexist in the same film.

For more writings on Soviet Montage Theory, read the following books: FILM FORM by Sergei Eisenstein, FILM SENSE by Sergei Eisenstein, KULESHOV ON FILM: THE WRITINGS OF LEV KULESHOV by Lev Kuleshov, FILM TECHNIQUE & FILM ACTING by V.I. Pudovkin, and KINO EYE: THE WRITINGS OF DZIGA VERTOV by Dziga Vertov.

For more on the idea of “content”, check out the cinema writings of André Bazin, one of the founders of French film magazine “Cahiers du cinema” in 1951. He preferred what he referred to as “true continuity” through mise en scène over experiments in editing and visual effects. And wouldn’t you know it… he championed both Charlie Chaplin and Vittorio De Sica!

Such is the motto of Robert McKee’s bible for storytellers, Story. Until I read his book a couple years ago and started hearing more and more screenwriters refer to “turns” and “reversals” and “turning left when they think you’ll turn right,” I had no idea how important a concept this was for screenwriting.

If William Goldman is right and “screenplays are structure,” then scenes are turns.

The next time you watch a film, really pay close attention to the structure of the individual scenes. Nearly every movie that follows classic Hollywood storytelling conventions will construct every scene around at least one turn. The beginning of the scene will present one situation, and by the end of the scene, that situation will turn to something else. The character will start happy and turn sad. The hero will be losing the battle and suddenly summon the strength to win. The girl will be making a fool of herself in front of the boy, but the boy will actually find this cute instead of foolish.

An extreme type of turn is called a reversal. These are 180-degree turns from one extreme to its polar opposite. Alive to dead. Attraction to repulsion. Kill to rescue.

One of the best reversals I’ve seen comes in Shane Black’s noir-comedy Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. In the scene, Robert Downey, Jr. is about to play Russian roulette on a prisoner in order to convince him to divulge information. We’ve seen this scenario play out a thousand times, and Black knows it. Downey puts a single bullet in the chamber of a revolver and aims it at the prisoner. He cries out, “Where is the girl?” and pulls the trigger. Since we’ve seen this scenario play out before, we expect it to go the exact same way as it always has: click, click, and finally the prisoner can’t take the fear of being shot anymore and gives up everything. But in Black’s film, before the prisoner can even deny knowing anything, the first pull of the trigger sends the only bullet in the revolver into his head, killing him. This always gets a rousing response of uproarious laughter from the audience, because we weren’t expecting it to go that way.

Another great example comes in Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges. Brendon Gleeson enters the scene wanting to kill his longtime friend played by Colin Farrell. But when he approaches Farrell with his gun drawn, he suddenly sees Farrell pull his own gun on himself in attempted suicide. Gleeson’s friend instincts kick in as his motivation goes from wanting to kill Farrell to wanting to save Farrell.

While you don’t need a reversal in every scene, it’s good to have as many as you can come up with. It keeps us on the edge of our seat. It’s the quality that makes us all say, “I had no idea what was going to happen in that movie.” It’s even better if you can play on previous cinematic convention like Black does in Bang Bang, making us expect something we’ve seen a trillion times only to deliver the exact opposite.

My acting teacher, Ben Taylor, recently wrote a hilarious scene that takes place in a gay strip club. It shows a drunk, middle-aged man stumbling around, seemingly infatuated with one of the boy dancers on stage. When another one of the employees at the bar tries to escort the man away, he cries out, “I’m his father!” Everyone freezes. Shock. A father has come in to a gay strip club and discovered his own son as a performer. This is the scene’s turn. But then the boy dancer shouts from the stage, “You’re not my father!” The drunk man replies, “Okay, I’m not his father.” This is a reversal of the initial turn, and got tons of laughs.

You can fold this on itself as much as the logic in your narrative allows. But there is a danger in placing too many turns and reversals in your scenes. It can start to come across as absurd coincidence. I just made this mistake in a scene I wrote for class. In my scene, a man returns home to his apartment, drunk, to find that all the furniture has been changed (turn #1). He also finds a woman he doesn’t know lying on his bed, beckoning him to stay with her (turn #2). When he starts to give in to her, thinking it’s just his lucky day, she mentions her husband (turn #3). Our hero asks her what apartment number this is. She says 304. Our hero freaks and proclaims, “I’m on the wrong floor! My key opened your door!” (turn #4). When he tries to leave, there’s a knock at the door. It’s the woman’s husband (turn #5). When the husband enters and sees our hero, it turns out they are old college buddies! (turn #6). Instead of kicking him out, the husband invites our hero to stay for dinner (turn #7). While I got decent notes on this scene in class, there’s no question that it is absolutely absurd, and I feel adequately displays the risk of implanting too many turns in a single narrative (for an example of a movie that does this, look no further than 2005′s inexplicable Best Picture winner, Crash, in which a select number of characters continue to conveniently bump into each other multiple times in a single day in a city of nearly ten million people).

The opposite extreme, of course, is writing a scene with no turns. If there isn’t a turn in a scene or narrative, you will quickly get bored and wonder why you’re watching it. Think of a scene where a character starts happy and ends happy. Or a narrative where a family is living a nice, quiet life in the suburbs and in the end still lives a nice, quiet life in the suburbs. Stories are change. To quote McKee’s fictional depiction in Adaptation., “Your characters must change, and the change must come from them.”

Amen.

Made as an homage, directly inspired by Dziga Vertov’s 1929 silent classic “Man With a Movie Camera,” it was shot and edited in a little over a 24 hour period. And, by later that following day, December 27th, links to the film were being passed around on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Strategically sent to film critic Roger Ebert making him one of the first to see “Idiot with a Tripod.” Ebert thinks the film should win an Academy Award for best live-action short subject. Enjoy …

It’s certainly impressive the way Stuart is able to tell a story without any words and pulls it together with an excellent choice of music. There are no spoken words, no graphics, not even any natural sound, yet the viewer sees a story through the images on the screen. We are able to follow the progression as the storm impacts life in New York. Nice work!

Here is a link to Vertov’s original 1929 silent classic “Man With a Movie Camera,” should you wish to watch.

By Roger Dooley
I tend to be more of a consumer of public relations than a creator. I’ve done my share of press releases and media interviews, but I’m bombarded with many times that quantity of public relations messages — news releases, book review requests, story suggestions and so on. Sadly, most of what I see is ineffective.

Want to craft a public relations message that engages the recipient? Use our understanding of the human brain to create that message. While there are many ways to play to brains of those readers, likely the most effective single technique is to tell a story.

Stories have a special appeal to human brains. The ability to process information from fellow humans was an important evolutionary advantage to our early ancestors. While they learned from direct experience like other creatures, they could also learn from the experiences of others. Whether this involved avoiding the lair of a dangerous animal, or locating a source of food, being able to readily absorb this second-hand information made these early communicators far more efficient than other species.

This preference for stories affects the way we process information, even in today’s high-tech environment. You can read statistics about the reliability of Toyota cars in reliable publications like Consumer Reports, but if your neighbor recounts a detailed horror story about a transmission problem and how he made three trips to the dealer to get it fixed, that one story will outweigh all the numeric data.

Our brains learn far better from specific examples than abstract information.

Brain scans show the potency of stories, even when they are merely text on a page. In a post about the efficacy of stories in advertising, I describe research showing that stories actually activate the parts of our brain related to the content. If we read about pedaling a bicycle up a hill, our brain will mimic that activity even if our legs remain still.

Never underestimate the power of text when it tells a story. One of the top-rated ads of this year’s Super Bowl was Google’s “Parisian Love” commercial. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS4Lb-ie4Lc]As I described in my post, “Power of Text,” there are no actors or CGI animation, no cute animals, no zooming cars, nothing but a series of words typed into a search boxes and their search results. A “neuro-engagement” study using EEG brain scans placed the Google ad in the top-five, ahead of almost all of the big-budget productions. This ad’s secret of success was that it told a compelling story.

One remarkable characteristic of spoken stories is that they actually synchronize the brains of the speaker and listener. If the listener is following the speaker’s story, his brain activity will become almost synchronous with that of the speaker.

In short, whether your goal is to inform or persuade, you first have to connect with your audience by engaging their brains. Statistics and dry facts won’t do that. There’s simply no better way to initiate and maintain that engagement than to present your message in the form of a story.

Successful online advertising isn’t just about the channel — from search to display to video — it’s about storytelling. When ads incorporate narrative elements, they increase interaction rates and the audience’s willingness to consider the product, react, or even move towards a purchase. Savvy advertisers know that nothing tells a story better than video. I would propose that the power of storytelling through sight, sound and motion is the reason why video is the fastest growing form of online advertising. eMarketer estimates that online video ad spending will grow 48% to $1.5 billion this year and hit $5.5 billion by 2014.

It’s now easier than ever for advertisers to choose online video, whether they’re national retailers or political candidates at the local level just beginning these efforts. The issue isn’t why use online video to tell your story, but how online video should tell your story. Even more important, how do you use online video to further your marketing strategy, tell a great story and generate concrete results? Let’s start by agreeing that not all online video advertising is created equal — or equal to every task — and start to build a holistic online video advertising strategy. Storytelling should move your audience emotionally and logically through the purchase funnel. Understanding how video works across that funnel and where to apply your resources at each stage is the key to unlocking that value.

Introduction – Create Awareness. The beginning of a story should grab viewers’ attention and introduce them to new places, characters, and concepts. At this stage, your video advertising must be disruptive and impactful. In-stream video is most effective in this case because it takes a short time to introduce and create awareness of your product or service. Much like television, the ad is presented in the course of viewing. So, if you are introducing a new product, then focus on driving awareness via broad in-stream buys. The goal is to disrupt, be brief, and be broad-based. And how do you know if you were successful? Research can clearly show when audiences exposed to your advertising have a higher awareness of your product than those who saw nothing.

For the rest of this article, click HERE.

However telling stories via video is what we do at StoryFirst, and you’d probably expect us to say that. So, to support our story of “the power of web video” – here are ten top statistics from research findings of recent industry studies. We think you’ll agree that these statistics make quite a compelling case for web video to tell your stories!

1. “Brands using online video have seen lifts of 20% to 40% in terms of incremental buying, with conversions that are twice the rate of other media.” (1)
2. 21% of retail web video viewers make a purchase online. (1)
3. 26% of retail web video viewers visit a store. (2)
4. 21% of retail web video viewers request more information. (1)
5. Video landing pages generate four to seven times higher engagement and response rates than static image and text landing pages. (3)
6. Well-optimized video is fifty-three times more likely than text to appear on the front page of Google. (4)
7. 68% of the top 50 Internet retailers use web video. (5)
8. 71% of Internet users watch video. (1)
9. 65% of all videos are viewed between 9am and 5pm, Monday to Friday. (1)
10. 33% of middle managers under 50 view work-related videos every day. (1)

SOURCES:
(1) Chris Crafton, CMO, eCorpTV.com, reported by Target Marketing at a Philadelphia
Direct Marketing Association networking and breakfast meeting.
(2) BIA/Kelsey User View study data, February 2010, reported by Turnhere.com.
(3) SearchEngineWatch, February 2010.
(4) Forrester Research, January 2010.
(5) Internet Retailer, July 2010.

What are your experiences with using video on your website and to tell your stories? Please share with us!
And, if you’d like to talk further about how web video can help you or your organization in Madison, give us a call – In Madison, WI 608-576-0174 or Austin, TX 512-782-9992.