Last week I had a 1 hour masterclass by Dakota Adan. It was part of the Trablin Summit I attended to in Marrakech. This masterclass has surprised me in many ways and Adan is amazing teacher. I wish that this masterclass was a lot longer. Adan gave us so much information and value in just 1 hour. If he was a University professor in film. I would totally take that class, sit on the front row and be the best f*king notetaker there is in existence!

So what better thing to do with all this knowledge than sharing it? I am a big believer that knowledge should be shared. So here are my notes from that class!

How to influence and inspire through video - Dakota Adan

Video creates an experience. It is all about the emotion, the story you are telling. We are all storytellers and video, compared to photo, pleases more than 1 sense.

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” - Maya Angelou

Exercise

Dakota gave us an exercise on the emotional tone and how you picture your story. Now this masterclass is filled with content creators. The summit was for travel influencers. So in the end we all have our brand, whetter we actually have our own brand or just an instagram page, it can still be seen as a brand. So the exercise goes as follows.

• Come up with a word that encapsulates/represents or support your brand.
• Come up with an image that would represent your brand (not a logo)
• Sound or music that encapsulates your brand
• What is the emotional tone of your brand?

Example

• Inspire to travel.
• Me traveling the world and seeing amazing places for the first time and getting caught up in the moment. The sensation of a new location and showing this image by really exploring.
• Some catchy and uplifting acoustic song that complements the location. A song that induces wanderlust.
• The emotion of exploring and being happy in the moment.

Now I have noticed that this can be used for any story or video you want to make. But a lot of brands want to portray in one specific way and stay coherent along the way.

Breath

Did you change the viewers breath with your video?

Breath is a reflection of your emotion. There's a reason that in meditation the focus is on breath. It is the connecting link between conscious and unconscious. It reflects on our emotion, breath changes with different emotions. When something is thrilling, sad or funny, it all reflects on our breath. We can observe our breath, but also influence it. Now when reviewing a video you made. Reflect on your breath, did you change your breath? Yes? Good, that means you got carried away by the video and you will continue watching it.

See the example video blow. Did you change your breath at any time during this video?

Audio

Audio is super important! It has to comprehend the video and the emotional tone you're trying to create. An example Dakota showed in this class is a short travel video. It was at a really awesome beach and then they went diving in the water. The first video was the final version with a comprehensive song. The second time, he had put the JAWS soundtrack on this. Now this was extremely funny, it was an extreme example. But I was thinking during the video, is something going to happen? Is he going to get attacked by a shark?

This is why audio is super important. It's not the first time that a really amazing video with awesome shots just gets punished with bad audio. But audio is more than music and when you are telling a story, make sure the talking is very understandable. People cannot stand bad audio. People will not watch your video when the audio is bad.

Here's a great experiment. You can skip to 0:37 where the experiment really starts.

The thing is. In the end, audio quality is more important than video quality. People will watch less quality video or worse video shots if the audio is great and they get carried away by the story.

Color psychology

Color has an enormous effect on our emotion. See the pictures below. Play with this and make sure the color of the video comprehends the emotional tone of the story.

Source

Source

Write often

Writing is often overlooked, but it is a super important skill. It's crucial in storytelling. In this session Adan instructs us to start writing. We have to write for 2 minutes straight without stopping. If we stop writing, he throw his shoe at us!

The exercise
"Start", He saids. We all start writing, including me. I just start writing as fast as I can without looking back. There's no time to think about what to write about. I just start. Meanwhile Adan is taking his shoe off. He documents this. "I am now taking off my shoe". We have no time to actually look up and see if he's doing this or not. "My laces are untied, I am now pulling of my shoe!"

I just continue writing. I can see in the side of my eye how the person sitting next to me is writing as fast as she can. "My shoe is off! If I see anyone stop writing, I will throw this shoe at you!". I can feel the pressure. Everyone does. I can feel the tension in the classroom. It's tense. Nobody wants to stop writing. There's no time to go back and alter mistakes. Just keep on writing the story. It's at this point that I slow down. It has the tensions of a race, but it is not a race. So I slow down on writing. But the person next to me doesn't. She keeps writing as fast as possible.

"If I see anyone stop writing...", he repeats, "This shoe will come flying at you". The 2 minutes fly by. Everyone has passed the test. Adan congratulates us with our victory.

Now this all has an important message. Adan didn't do this to just f*ck with us or just because he taught it would be funny. But this was an important message. It is important to keep writing your story. Do not look back, do not spend time to edit anything. Just keep writing the story. There's time later to fine tune everything, but not with an unfinished story.

This is important with writing, but also with video. Capture the story first, capture way too much, in fact capture everything if you can. There's always time later to cut out the unneeded parts. And even with editing. Put in the story first, then fine tune. It saves a lot of time and the end result will be better.

Your story is enough

Please remember that your story is enough. This is the most important message of this whole Trablin Summit event and also of this masterclass. Tell your story and share it with others. Do not fear what others think. Speak without fear. Most people struggle with this, thinking that their story isn't worth telling. Even those we look up to, those who are an example to us or our idol. They also struggled with this at one point in their life. That ended when they crossed the bridge and actually started sharing their story.

We're already at the end of this masterclass. This 1 hour passed so quickly and Adan did an amazing job to give us as much value as possible. One more thing he tells us about storytelling is: Try to write out the narratives in your head before trying to capture them.

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I hope this post was helpful! Thank you for reading. Make sure to leave a comment below. I'd love to hear from you :)

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