Treatment by: Taylor Robinson
Greetings!
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Glad you're here.
This is a web page I've created to help explain our (Six Foot Five's) vision for a storytelling video project for Lifeline.
After
Below you'll find my "director's treatment."
Narrative approach
At Six Foot Five, we are fascinated with storytelling. How it works. Why it works. What works best. Why people respond to stories the way they do. Etc. This fascination has rendered us expert storytellers. That's why I believe the best way to communicate anything to anyone - is to just tell them a story about it.
This is our wheelhouse.
As we set out to tell a beautiful story of redemption in a young girl's life, there are a few things that I will be trying to bring to the surface first and foremost. As we begin to look through possible stories to tell these are the things I would say are most important.
1. Relatability - We want the audience to relate with our "hero" in as many ways as possible. They may not know what it's like to live in Africa, or what it's like to worry about being kidnapped every day, BUT they do know what it's like to have a family, and/or what it's like to be terrified. We'll frame the story we're telling in a way that will endear our audience to our hero.
2. High Stakes - 100 times out of 100, the higher the stakes, the better the story. Compassion is loaded with stories of high stakes. Hunger. Danger. Heaven. Hell. With high stakes comes our hero's high vulnerability. It will be my job as the storyteller to really dig in deep and help our audience understand how vulnerable our hero is AND how much is at stake.
3. Transformation - It's in the transformation that our story will take wings. Any story that has a huge emotional impact throws gasoline on the transformation fire. But the transformation isn't just the good part at the end...rather it's the contrast between the good and the bad that make the transformation powerful. So we'll fight hard to make the "bad" as bad as it can be, that way the "good" can be really good.
To effectively knock our story out of the park, I like to spend good time prior to the shoot to get my head all the way around all of the ingredients we'll be working with during the shoot. The above 3 things are our 3 key ingredients we'll be hunting.
beautiful visuals
Telling a story well and making it visually beautiful is where the magic happens.
We bring the highest level of production value to all of our shoots. We’ve become masters at stretching budget dollars as far as we can, while at the same time keeping the quality as high as possible.
Over the past decade, we've become experts at shooting beautiful, cinematic, live-action content all over the world. Most of the time this has to happen in situations less than optimal for high-level production. The secret is having an experienced, talented, and versatile crew. Sound. Lighting. Camera. Direction. Etc. We have a stable full of talented, experienced crew personnel that as the director I would pick from to go with us.
We want to tell the story we're filming as beautifully as possible.
I could write more words about our visuals, but they should be able to speak for themselves. Here's a short demo reel I cut of some of the most beautiful stuff we've shot with Compassion.
the ultimate goal
Yes, this video will be beautiful. Yes, we will tell this incredible story of redemption extremely well.
But, ultimately, we want to see thousands of kids get sponsored. Knowing that is our ultimate goal, will help us to make each and every decision well.
As we are crafting the story we will be paying careful attention to all of the details that help the audience at each of the Living Proof Live events understand the role that THEY can play in the life of a child living in poverty. We don't want to JUST tell a story well, we want to do it in a way that shows our audience the kind of impact they can make in the life of a child. Talk about throwing gasoline on the fire.
I call this "putting a mirror in the story." While our audience is watching our video, we want them to see themselves in the story. Somehow. Somewhere.
Also, we know that this video will be part of a bigger live event, so we need to make sure our video fits perfectly into the entire presentation that will be happening at the conferences.
Keeping all of this in mind, we will also create a few ancillary videos to compliment the live event video. Possibly creating a 60-second spot that can be sent in a follow-up email after the event. Or we could create a short 30-second trailer for the main presentation story. This piece could be emailed out before the event, or possibly played in the pre-rolls before our main session.
I know you mentioned that you like the idea of this entire campaign being called "Set Her Free." When we begin creating all of these different deliverables, we'll be sure to craft them all with an over-arching campaign in mind.
Proof for the pudding
You've read a lot about our ability to pull this project off, but our previous work should speak for itself. Below are a few spots we've created for Compassion in the past.
Each project is different, and I can foresee that our Set Her Free content should be at a slower pace, and a little more "syrupy" than most of the videos below. But I compiled this list of videos to prove we'd knock this project out of the park.
This is a longer-form story we created for Compassion's Church Engagement team. This story features, Peter Habyarimana, and it was created to be played in churches and at live events.
We have been asked to create the videos that play at the end of a few of the stories featured in the Compassion Expereience. Here are a couple:
Another spot we created for the Church Engagement team with Richmond Wandera.
We were asked to tell the powerful story of Katlin Boyda using only already existing pictures and footage.
We have many more examples of narrative storytelling that we've done for multiple organizations all over the globe. If you'd like to see more please let me know and I'll send it your way.
Thanks for your time
Again, thank so much for giving us the opportunity to pitch on this project. I believe our team is uniquely positioned to step in and knock this specific project out of the park for you.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to either me or our producer, Audra Whaley.
Thanks again,
Taylor Robinson
205.215.9288
Audra Whaley
940.395.1330