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As President of Reliant Studios, part of my job is to extract the nuances of life that make for compelling stories for the dozens of videos that we produce every year. However, nuances rarely come easy. Most people won’t sit down and bear it all. You have to work for it.

I’ve learned in my role here, and from my background as a professional therapist, that there are certain strategies that can transport people to a place where they feel safe enough to give you a peek into their soul. This peek is the difference between a lifeless “talking head” and a narrative that fulfills the soul’s desire to connect with others in authentic ways, and ultimately, motivates people to action.

If creating connections through video interviews is part of your role, here are some pointers to help you get the good stuff.

Before the Interview

Prepare open-ended questions

Know your goals for the interview and then plan open-ended questions to ask. Avoid asking questions with “yes or no” answers. These are interview dead-ends and you will be constantly prompting the client for more. Open questions allow your interviewees to clarify and explore their own thoughts and feelings in their own words. Remember, questions should be designed as guides and should only serve to help you navigate toward your goals. Don’t be afraid to take a few detours as new information emerges throughout the interview.

Learn about your subjects

Sometimes you’ll have the luxury of knowing the person you are interviewing, but more often than not, you will arrive at a shoot without much prior knowledge of the interviewees. If you can ask a co-worker about them or get a quick peak at their desk – to notice pictures or sports team pennants for example – the likelihood of building rapport (thus allowing the interviewee to let down his/her guard) is much higher!

During the Interview

Balance the Conversation

It is tempting to simply read through your list of questions when you sit down to do an interview. This is fine when you are first learning, but as you grow and develop what will eventually set your interviews apart is your ability to be comfortable in your own skin. The goal is to achieve a balance of conversation, asking questions and directing–and re-directing!–tangents. Make this balance a goal, but know that it is OK if it takes awhile to get there.

Mind Your Nonverbals

Here are the basics:

• Maintain eye-contact.
• Nod and engage your facial expressions in the conversation.
• Maintain an open stance: arms open, face interviewee squarely.
• Relax.
• Match the interviewee’s pace of speech and grammatical style.

Go Back

Sometimes I jump right into an interview only to realize the interviewee has totally shut down or has started answering with canned, scripted responses. When this happens, stop! Don’t keep trying to push through. Back up and ask them about something comfortable and familiar. Discuss their favorite sports team, their family, or even something you were talking about before the interview started. If they can relax, it will change the whole direction of your interview.

Use Restatements

This was something I didn’t really believe in until I tried it a few times. As a therapist, my job is to always practice active listening. This translates into conducting interviews as well. After an interviewee gets done answering a question, simply reflect back to them what they just said. Say an interviewee just finished telling you some reasons why he thinks his staff is great. You then say something like: “So it sounds like you have an awesome team of people working for you.” I thought people would say “yes, dummy, that’s what I just told you.” But, you will be surprised when they start talking about the same topic all over again, only with much more emotion and passion.

Peel the Onion

Fritz Perls, a trained psychoanalyst and developer of the psychological therapy called Gestalt Therapy, talked about “peeling the onion” during therapy sessions. A good interview peels back layers as well. This usually occurs in three parts: (1) talking about the situation cognitively; (2) achieving emotional depth; (3) making sense of it all in a way that conveys closure or hope. Most people can do numbers one and two, but they forget number three. This is what ties it all together, so don’t forget to ask questions like: what did that all mean to you?

Don’t Take Notes!

There is nothing that takes you and the interviewee out of the moment quicker than note-taking while interviewing. Your interviewee will be be wondering what you are writing and you won’t be paying attention. Stay in the moment. Bring someone else to take notes if you absolutely have to have them.

Behind the Scenes

Eliminate Distractions

Some interviews go wrong simply because of distractions in and around the interview area. Make sure your crew doesn’t take the interviewee out of the moment. They should not only avoid moving around too much, but also make sure that their camera batteries are charged and that their memory cards aren’t going to fill up. Simple intentionality with your set-up is a key to success in all interview situations.

Make the Interviewee Comfortable

Offer water, adjust the temperature in the room if necessary, give them a comfortable chair and watch their body language for any signs of fatigue during the interview. If you think they need a break, ask them and then allow them to take one. Resting for 5-10 minutes and starting fresh can be much more profitable than trying to push through with a tired subject.

Remember: Work on Yourself First

There is a lot to remember, but when I’m feeling overwhelmed with technique, I go back to something I learned in grad school. If the person you are interviewing can sense that you genuinely care about them and their story, they are much more likely to open up. So much of doing a good interview is simply who you are. Work on yourself first: your attitude, your concern for the situation, your motives in conducting an interview. When you combine an appropriately caring attitude with the techniques outlined above, you’ll start to capture those authentic story-building nuances you’re seeking.

Brainstorming sessions have proved to be an invaluable tool at Reliant. Time and time again, I’m surprised at our team’s ability to collectively develop an idea or concept that is far better than what any of us could come up with individually.

But, every now and then, a brainstorming meeting can stall. The energy level is low and everyone is frozen by the pressure of developing creative ideas. There are many tactics leaders can use to avoid this potential stagnation, but one effective method we’ve found is surprisingly simple: start every brainstorming meeting with a game.

Why play games?

Creative games stimulate the same areas of the brain that your team will be using to do some creative problem solving or brainstorming. The activity gets the mind warmed up and ready to sprout amazing ideas.

We’ve also found that playing games is an effective icebreaker. It loosens everyone up and takes the pressure off the situation at hand. We remember that this type of work is actually fun and enjoyable for people like us. And while competitive spirits may flare up during the game, we’d much rather have a little fire going into a freewheeling whiteboard session than apathy.

Best Practices to Follow

So, let’s say you’re convinced; you want to start your next meeting with a game. Here are some best practices we’ve developed at Reliant to keep game time purposeful and productive.

1. Plan for 10-15 minutes of game time at the beginning of your meeting. At first, you may be hesitant to give up this time when you could be doing “real work.” Trust me, the increased productivity in the meeting to follow will more than make up for the time you spent playing the game.
2. Be sure to clearly explain the rules of the game you’re playing. Keep it simple. You’ll become more efficient at this step (or can even eliminate it) as you start repeating games, obviously.
3. As the leader, you’ll have to be the disciplined one that has to end the game after the allotted time. Leave your team wanting more; they’ll actually start looking forward to your meetings!
4. Move into the meeting immediately after ending the game. Make your meeting feel like an extension of the game. This will keep your team “in the zone” with the creative sections of their brain.

What games should we play?

The key in choosing effective right-brain-stimulating games is to think of those that require creative problem solving skills. It’s helpful to have a bucket of games that you rotate through to keep things interesting. Here’s a short list of some that we’ve found effective.

Charades

The classic party game actually stretches creative thinking just as much as it inspires rolling-on-the-floor laughter. There are dozens of ways to play, but the key for our context is to keep it simple. We typically break into two teams and use this random word generator to supply the clues in order to keep the game time efficient and fair. To keep score, we usually just add up the time it takes a team to guess each clue. After everyone has had a chance to be the “actor” at least once, the team with the lowest “time total” wins.

Guesstures

This is really just one of the many “official” packaged versions of charades. If you’d rather not make up your own rules or come up with all the clues, use Guesstures.

Pictionary

Another oldie-but-a-goodie, we typically structure this just like charades, only people must draw the clue instead of act it out. While your own whiteboard usually works just fine for this, you can always buy the official packaged version if you’ve got the money to spend.

Catch Phrase

If you’re looking for the simplest and quickest game to play on this list, this classic do-anything-you-can-to-get-your-team-to-guess-the-clue-before-time- runs-out is your best option. Here’s a link to the high-tech electronic version.

Taboo

Similar to Catch Phrase, Taboo throws in an additional twist: it gives you a short list of words that you can’t say while describing your clue. You’d be surprised how creative you’re forced to become when trying to describe a zebra without saying stripes, black, white, animal, or Africa.

Scattergories

If you’ve never played Scattergories, I won’t go into a detailed rule explanation, but this game specifically encourages people to think of solutions that no one else in the room will think of. The benefits of this mind-stretching are obvious as you transition into a brainstorming session. Be sure to allow a bit of extra time the first time you play it in order to clearly explain the rules. We typically play 2-3 rounds.

We’ve found game-playing to be an indispensable component of our creative process. I think you’ll agree once you give it a shot!

In the fall of 1997, I was an English teacher at a local high school when a computer connected to this weird “Internet” thing was dropped on my desk. Not knowing what the term “early adopter” even meant at that time, I was quickly swept away with the possibilities of how this technology could engage students and enhance their learning. I was particularly drawn to this ability to access a seemingly bottomless treasure trove of useful videos. Even though most were terribly grainy and pixelated, they helped me communicate profound lessons and stories in a way that I could never do by myself.

Fast forward to 2011: over HALF of the total activity last year on the world wide web was people watching video. If you think that’s impressive, experts predict that video will account for 90% of all Internet traffic over the next three years. Think about that. How many emails do you send in a year? How many hours to you spend tweeting and facebooking? Furthermore, YouTube, the video sharing site, is the second most used search engine. Not Bing, not Yahoo. YouTube. Certainly, many of us are seeking a way to avoid the “difficult” activity of reading, but what if there’s a more powerful compulsion at work?

Here at Reliant, we contend that the evolution of storytelling is now coming full circle by using technology to regain the power of face-to-face communication on an exponential scale. Think of how hard it is to convey sarcasm when you write an email to a co-worker or how unfunny a written description of Charlie biting his brother’s finger would be. Then consider video. If done purposefully, the audience can pick up on the facial cues, the vocal intonation, the visual comedy, even many of the non-verbal aspects of how we communicate. Add in cinematic effects like lighting, sound, music, and framing, and suddenly these moving pixels have the ability to tug at heartstrings, to excite, to persuade, and to move people to action.

“Video is high-bandwidth for a reason. It packs a huge amount of data, and our brains are uniquely wired to decode it.” – Chris Anderson, TED

It turns out that we are wired for visual storytelling. It’s baked into our very DNA. In eons past, this storytelling was only possible in intimate settings with a few people. Today, however, this ability to distribute effective video via the Internet has created a new golden age of communication. We’re living in the midst of a seismic shift back to an oral culture with one key difference: through Internet+video, anybody can now visually tell their story to not just a few people, but millions. It’s oral culture scaled to the nth degree.

People demand visual communication and are gobbling it up every chance they get. Are you missing out on the opportunity to truly compel, persuade, and ignite your audience through video?

“The secret of eloquence lies in believing passionately in what you’re talking about.” – Jon Steel, The Perfect Pitch.

Since the dawn of time, humans have felt compelled to be a social creature. We connect and live together. We break bread together. We clearly have a strong innate desire to be relational, to find ways to make deeper connections with our loved ones and those around us. Over time, the oral tradition of storytelling gave way to the printing press, which in turn gave way to the digital age. Indeed, many believe that the Creator of the universe did so to experience relationship and be an active participant in the story of all our lives.

This desire to be involved in a story–to tell our own stories and our organizations’ stories– inevitably led to what we now call marketing, communication, public relations, and advertising. At its essence, all those forms of communication is telling a story: the story of how your nonprofit helps the homeless, how your hospital helps those in pain, how your financial services help to provide peace of mind and comfort, or how your production of plastics provides needed parts for the growing of food.

The elements of what makes up a good story have been the same throughout the millennium. The specifics that are said or related in a way that either make or break the story have not changed – think of them as the ‘physics of story.’

The question of why certain messaging connects or fails to connect is something we consider on a daily basis here at Reliant Studios. In the coming months, we would like to share with you our opinions, along with some facts, market research, and case studies, on how organizations tend to either succeed or fail at communicating their message. And specifically, how the rising use of video can help to tell a purposeful visual narrative and play a more progressive role in telling your stories.