How to PACE a story

A short story…

It’s Saturday morning. You wake up later than usual, which signals to your dog that it’s the weekend. She knows she’s getting more attention than normal, and maybe even a long walk! She jumps into bed excitingly, wiggling all over, and she starts incessantly licking your face. CHAOS! You can’t seem to get her off of you! She’s just too excited to calm down!

Eventually, you get her off the bed, put your robe on, and slowly make your way downstairs. You fumble to get the coffee, boil the water (unless you’re stateside and use a drip maker), and wait for your brew to be ready. Your dog, knowing the moment you finish your coffee is when a walk will happen, watches your every move.

Do you see the difference?

It’s only a wee story, but hopefully in just these two scenes, you can feel the difference in pacing. The first scene is energetic, joyful, chaotic, and fast; the second scene is slow, calm, and almost boring. There’s contrast between the two scenes: fast pace versus slow pace.

Pacing is how we show the different emotions throughout a story, and contrasting emotion is how we emphasize each of those emotions.

Tension & Release

In traditional storytelling, the pace goes through a flow of tension and release, with each segment of tension getting more intense than the previous.

In the YouTube world, there’s a misconception that overall fast paced videos perform better, and, while there may be truth to a shortening attention span in the younger generations, a well-paced story still needs a balance between fast-paced and slow-paced scenes. Viewers need time to process what happened after a fast scene. It’s hard to develop characters when scenes are consistently fast. No matter how good the editing, if the pacing is always fast, after a while, it will become boring as if there was no editing at all.

Breath In, Breath Out.

The most successful videos on YouTube have a balance between fast paced and slow-paced scenes, with the slow scenes intentionally edited to allow just enough time to reflect, but not get bored. These could be scenes where we meet the characters, see people interact, talk about your thoughts and feelings, or give more of a backstory. One thing to note is that what you show in those moments should align with your channel goals. It doesn’t make sense to give a boat tour in a down moment if your channel is about adventure cooking and vice versa.

So, How Do You Do It?

Choose your tone.

I often get feedback that storyboarding in advance is not practical in the adventure setting. “You never know what’s going to happen or if something is going to break!” Despite this feedback, my experience is that you still can (and should) do some planning. I’ll give you an example.

In two weeks, I am about to do an ocean crossing delivering a boat from Fiji to New Zealand (yayyyy, SO EXCITED!). I know that I will be sailing with a new captain and two of my patrons. Things might break. Relationship dynamics might be off. I might get seasick, food poisoning, and my period all at once (again).

With all this information, I am planning on a “tone” of uncertainty, action and adventure for the series. I have two tension points for fast-paced scenes that I know I can focus on throughout the sail: tension because of the unknown OR because the unknown has manifested. E.g. “The boat might roll in big waves, oh, no!” OR “The boat rolled in big waves, oh no!”

Therefore, slow-paced scenes will either be recovering from uncertainties which have been resolved or recovering from the uncertainties having manifested. E.g. “Thank god the weather was good throughout the passage! Let’s have a celebratory beer!” OR “Thank god we were able to get through that weather on the passage! Let’s have a celebratory beer!”

One thing to note is that this tension and release actually follows the normal human emotions. There is only so much tension we can handle as humans before it has to be released! Tune in internally to see what is naturally occurring, and you may be surprised to see that the pacing is naturally happening.

Dialogue

Once you have settled on a tone for your video, which in my case is uncertainty and adventure, you want to generate dialogue that feeds into the tone. For example, when I am flying to Fiji, I have no idea if my return ticket will work, if the captain will meet me at Port Denarau on time, or if I will get along with the crew. I will be voicing all of those thoughts and feelings along my journey (a note here that YouTube viewers in the adventure sphere don’t typically like complainers, so having some optimism or hope behind your words can go a long way).

When things do go wrong in my video, I will capture reactions shots from each of the crew members, preferably in the moment, but also in the aftermath as they recover. I’ll also aim to get the crew members speaking fast and only using small snippets of each member speaking to show the disorientation.

Then, once the drama has passed, I will capture the change in tone by getting longer shots with less movement. I may show more dialogue from one person before moving on to the next character.

You’ll remember from my last newsletter that it’s not about showing the actual footage of a moment, but rather tapping into the actual emotional experience of a moment. And this definitely isn’t about making up drama out of nowhere. It’s about telling the full story, which inevitably includes concerns and anxieties you have or had. Don’t minimize that because they don’t feel very big or because you know you can cope. The goal is to show everyone what the experience is like, and it’s all part of the story!

Intentional shots

The way the camera or subjects move during each scene will also set the pace. For example, the head sail furler got jammed on a passage I did, and we had to wind it up by hand before entering Fiji. That scene was filled with tension, so I made sure the shots included lots of movement, either from the camera or the subjects. That movement has an impact of creating intensity and a faster pace.

Once we made it into port and were feeling the relief after arrival, I used smooth and slower camera movements, and the subjects were seated and not moving at all. This has the impact of creating a sense of peace and serenity.

Scene Pacing

Another way you can pace a video is by how fast the story progresses. On YouTube, it’s important have fast story progression in the first few minutes of the video in order to prevent your audience from clicking away. This is something you need to experiment with though. You can see from the two retention graphs I’ve shown below that I’ve struggled to reduce the drop off in the first 3.30 minutes before the curve flattens out.

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In this second graph though, I’ve flattened it out much earlier by drawing people in and moving the story along faster.

Editing

The last way you should pace your video (and arguably the least important) is through editing. I say least important because I know from personal experience how much time and effort I spent in the editing process, when what I needed was to get better at thinking through and filming my videos. This has held true for the majority of people I’ve been coaching.

But alas, there are many ways to pace in the editing process (some I mentioned in the last newsletter), such as through music and cut lengths.

One of the best ways I pace my edits is by using a mix of voiceovers versus me talking to the camera. When I talk to the camera, it’s normally with a bunch of energy and a big smile, so I’ve gotten into a habit of preparing for those moments in advance as much as I can (because I normally have only one take!). Alternatively, I use voiceovers for the deep / thoughtful moments since I have more time and more takes. In the first half of the video, I aim to keep all dialogue under 30 seconds, and no more than 1 minute of either voiceovers or talking to the camera in a row ever throughout the video. I also try to rotate between the two.

Takeaway

Recently, I interviewed Steve and Judy from Sailing Fair Isle. If you aren’t familiar with their channel, they both worked in television, including with the BBC: Steve as a camera man and Judy as a broadcaster. I was surprised to hear they did no planning for their videos. It went against everything I’ve been learning. But when I dug into it deeper (out of pure disbelief), two things were clear:

-They have the experience to not need to plan – Steve already knew exactly which shots would portray which emotion and could make that decision on the spot;

AND

-They were putting thought into it more than they initially said. For example, in a recent episode, they came into a new anchorage in the dark, and Steve knew he needed to get up early the next morning capture the sunrise, in his words, “to show the contrast of emotions”. He knew he needed to pace the video and was thinking ahead to get the shots.

Action

Here are two practical actions you can take to improve your pacing:

1. Tune in in the moment and figure out whether you are emotionally on a trough or peak. Depending on which point you’re at, how can you make sure you are filming to capture the emotion of the moment? What scenes can you predict are to come that might show the contrast in emotion? How can you best record that upcoming scene to enhance the pacing?

2. Draw a graph of the three-act structure on a large sheet of paper. Put each scene or “story beat” on a post-it and place it on the sheet of paper according to whether it’s fast-paced (lots of action) or slow paced (recovery / reflection scene). Once you have all the sticky notes on the paper, step back and consider the overall pace of your story. If all the story beats are placed high up, it means there’s no recovery / processing time.

Rollercoasters are only exciting because of the transition from high to low. What scares you is the swoop down to the bottom.