I’m sitting here in my hotel in downtown Auckland on a cloudy Wednesday morning, and my brain is mulling over storytelling, as it always is. I am part of a community for YouTubers run by George Blackman, and one idea that we have been exploring is Story Progression Mechanisms. So, let me explain what it is, and why this should be the top of your mind too!

Need a Goal

In a previous newsletter, I wrote about the importance of a start point and end point for your channel. You must have something you are working towards.

• Start point: I bought a sailboat with no experience.
• End point: I have sailed around the world.

The same goes for each individual video. You need a clear start and end point.

• Start point: We want to sail to Great Barrier Island.
• End point: We sailed to Great Barrier Island.

The goal of this episode would clearly be to get to Great Barrier Island. Then, everything you do should be progressing towards achieving that end point.

No End Point

But what if you don’t have a clear end point? Or what if your end point is just seeing a new location. That’s kind of boring, isn’t it?

• Start point: We want to explore this island.
• End point: We saw this island.

In this case, what you need is a Story Progression Mechanism.

Story Progression Mechanism

A Story Progression Mechanism takes some element of the location, characters, or other aspects and puts in something that will progress and change.

For example, I recently made a video about visiting the South Island of New Zealand and seeing how isolated it is. If I had used a Story Progression Mechanism, I could have had each location get more and more isolated. As I got to a more isolated location, the story would have clearly been progressing towards the most isolated place.

Let’s do another example with the island exploration video. Imagine that you have a meal you want to create when you get home. So, at each location, in addition to seeing the sites, you make a big deal about picking up ingredients. The story would have clearly been progressing towards having all the ingredients and cooking the meal at the end of the day.

Or, let’s imagine you are on a 4WD expedition, and throughout you will be going over some crazy landscapes. You could have each landscape become progressively more challenging, with the most challenging hump being at the end.

In all these stories, there is an element which is progressing or being added to the story. We aren’t just going from location to location.

Set It Up

One thing that is crucial for this to work is making sure you set up the structure of the video in the intro. The viewers need to know how the story will progress, or they will constantly be asking themselves, “What’s the point?” in each scene.

An example of this is a video I did about the northwest coast South Island. I set off to just see the location and have a good time. In the end, I saw a sweet cave, a blowhole, and an incredible hike. These are seemingly random things I saw, but what I could have done was order them in a way where each site was getting, “more incredible”, and I would have made that clear in the intro.

One thing that tripped me up though is that I would have had to reorder the way the events occurred. Which is where the edit comes in…

In the Edit

Let’s jump back to my very clear example of all the isolated locations in my South Island video. As I went on my road trip, the order of the locations I visited did not progressively become more isolated. BUT that doesn’t mean I had to edit it that way. I could have easily reordered each stop to clearly become more isolated.

Don’t get stuck on the story having to occur in the order you filmed it.

Action

For your next video, get creative with adding a Story Progression Mechanism. It can literally be anything, including a change in character physicality, emotionality, or locationality (that last one probably isn’t a word). My point is, find a way to make the story progress rather than just having the same boring site-seeing videos.

BONUS ACTION: See if you can figure out the mechanism used in videos you are watching yourself!