Emotion in Storytelling

When I was child, I was often told I was “too emotional”. As the middle of seven kids all homeschooled by my mom, I can understand why my parents didn’t have the capacity to deal with all of our emotions. Gaslighting is an effective way to quiet a wee child down.

But it’s lately after interviewing over a dozen big creators and taking online film school that I realise my “big emotions” are one of my biggest strengths. Time and time again, the one thing interviewees all say over and over again is a good episode makes you feel things. In fact, according to Walter Murch, editor of The Godfather I, II, and III and author of In the Blink of An Eye, emotion should make up 51 percent of your edit, with story following at 23 percent.

That’s right – emotion BEFORE story.

You see, emotion is absolutely fundamental to engaging your audience, making you relatable, and, most importantly, helping them understand their own emotions through your story. The best stories leave us feeling big feelings!

How do we do it?

To start, I want to manage your expectations. Crafting a video and story around emotions is incredibly hard, and something you should continuously be practicing and learning about. Emotion also isn’t just one thing. Emotion is everything I’ve written about and everything to follow. Every choice you make is enhancing or degrading an emotion.

The key is to know what those decisions are so at least it’s intentional, but even after knowing each aspect, it will take you YEARS, decades even, to master emotion.

Below I will share with you a few examples of decisions that can impact emotion to give you a wee taster, and I will deep dive into them in the newsletters to follow.

The first step to embracing emotion in your videos… is you.

WHO ARE YOU?

I’m not going to waste your time with things I’ve already written about, but do you know your channel goals? Have you chosen the identity you want on YouTube? Knowing, being comfortable with, and accepting yourself and your goals is ESSENTIAL to being able to portray emotions. How can you possibly be intentional if you don’t know yourself and what you feel?

My editor and I have a chat about my retention graphs after I publish each episode (which are recorded and available to my Patreons), and she’s been saying something to me that’s only recently ‘clicked’: “People want to know what it’s like.” What was the train like? What was the hike like? What was the sail like? It feels so luxurious. I’m overwhelmed. We’re so relieved.

In order to show them what it’s like, it can help to come up with a series of questions that tap into what you’re feeling and experiencing in that moment. My process here isn’t fully fine-tuned yet (more research being done), but it looks something like this right now:

• Key moment happens: train is leaving the station
• Daniella, how are you feeling? So Freaking excited!
• Why? What’s the significance of this moment? I used to only spend practically, and this is the first time I’ve splurged on something just because I love it!
• What are you hoping to get out of this trip? I want to simply enjoy myself.
• What happens if you fail (stakes)? I’ll just keep going through the motions of life and not enjoying the “glimmers”. I might die tomorrow and not truly lived.
• And what would that feel like? I would be disappointed in myself that I had not lived my fullest life. It would feel like I’d wasted my life away.

Provide a Different Perspective

I remember two years ago when I was making videos about a partner’s illness for my former channel. Because he was the patient, a lot of the videos were about my experience. I was the accessible character to record. There’s no way he wanted a camera in his face while he was recovering.

Post-hospital, I had a chat with him about his emotional experience, and then brainstormed ways I could show that experience with the shots that I had.

What I landed on was a video where it appeared you were in his head, and his eyes were just opening after a procedure to a hospital room. Hospital sounds slowly faded he became conscious. The voiceover was his internal dialogue. The footage was a hospital room downloaded from pexels.com (a free stock video site).

That video received almost 100,000 views in the first month it was published, with the audience consistently commenting on that scene. That’s because I didn’t show the actual footage of that moment, but rather tapped into the actual emotional experience of that moment.

Reorder the Shots

Last week, I put out a video about my first time winter camping in New Zealand’s 3rd poorest region. I sent a draft to my editor and my Patrons for comments and feedback, and they all said the order of one scene was detracting from the emotion. The scene was me in the rain throwing a stick to my dog. I had initially thought the rain made the shot sad, but they said my dog made the scene too happy for the emotions I was trying to portray. A simple moving of the clip to the end of the scene solved that problem and then added the impact of creating contrast to the previously sad moment.

Cut Length Impacts Emotion

Walter Murch, who I previously mentioned, talks about using the length of cuts to impact emotion. As an easy rule of thumb, the length of a cut determines the emotion you are portraying as follows:

• >4 seconds = anxiety, excitement, tension, high energy, nervousness
• 4-6 seconds = normality, neutrality, status quo
• 7+ seconds = boring, thoughtful, peaceful, contemplative, low energy

Now, a reminder that all rules are intended to be broken once they are practiced and thoroughly understood. There are numerous examples of this rule being broken, and doing so is a great way to be hyper aware of the emotion you are portraying. One common example is how slow cuts are often paired with slow tension-building music in action movies right before the cuts and music become fast-paced.

Music

Music follows similar rules to cut lengths, in that the pace sets the emotions:

• fast-paced music = anxiety, excitement, tension, high energy, nervousness
• medium-paced music = normality, neutrality, status quo
• slow-paced music= boring, thoughtful, peaceful, contemplative, low energy

What’s interesting, though, is to consider how the lack of music, starting of music at certain times, or removing music can enhance emotion. The goal here is to be thoughtful and intentional, but let me give you a scenario to consider:

I’m on a train. I’m excited. [I’m editing a video about trains right now… can you tell?] The music is energetic to match my tone. But WAIT! What’s that!?! A massive, beautiful gorge opens up suddenly, and I freeze, awestruck! The music quickly changes to match this change of tone. I then go on to tell you about the train’s history. It’s interesting, but no notable emotion in the facts, and I really want my audience to hear my words rather than feel at this moment. Maybe no music?

Having music should never be a given. It should always be there to serve a purpose and be intentionally support the emotion of the current scene and the emotional flow of the entire episode.

Takeaway

I could go on and on about the various aspects that affect the emotional experience of a video: The angle of the camera; the color and brightness of the shot; composition. But as I am going to be getting into each of these aspects as this newsletter progresses, I’ll leave you with emphasizing that you need to prioritise emotion.

It doesn’t have to be an extreme emotion or deeply thoughtful like some creators. Maybe that’s not your headspace, and you quite literally live in a carefree, lighthearted world (Please come get me! I’m drowning in my deep “The world needs to heal!” thoughts”). There’s a place for every emotion, and in fact, that might align with the audience you are trying to attract.

Whatever your emotional experience is, OWN IT and DISPLAY IT.

Action

Here’s an exercise that might help you gauge what questions to ask yourself to get in touch with your emotional experience.

Go to your favorite creator and pick a successful episode to study. “Successful” means it is a stand-out episode that is doing better than the episodes that were published around the same time.

Every time the creator talks to the camera or does a voiceover, ask yourself, “What’s the question that would have gotten that reply?”

Use that as a guide as to what you should ask yourself when you’re filming.