Sometimes you do storytelling in the form of a 10,000-word story. Sometimes you do it with compelling images, videos, and sounds. Sometimes you do it in the intro to a strategic plan (which I’ve actually done). And sometimes, all you have are a bunch of talking-head Zoom recordings, which was what I had to work with on a recent project.
Throughout the pandemic, the Duke Graduate School has been developing web-based professional development events for its students. One such program is a series called Senior Leadership Insights — 30-minute Zoom conversations with alumni who are in executive roles about how their training at Duke influenced their careers.
Recently, I was asked to put together a short promo video for the series using footage from the conversations that had been held. While the interviewees all offered many insightful comments, the challenge here was how to pull together a string of soundbites — removed from their full context — into some sort of interesting arc, rather than just creating a jumble of thematically unconnected one-liners.
Given that all the video footage were Zoom interviews, they were not the most exciting or high-quality visual. So the interest would have to come from another source. As I listened through some of the interviews, one particular comment from an alum caught my attention:
One day I was happily running a chemical business, and the company CEO called me into his office and said, “Bob I want you to leve the chemical business. I want you to move to Brazil. I want you to run a packaging business. Oh by the way, you need to learn Portuguese.
I had found my hook! I chopped that soundbite up into four snippets. The opening line served as the start of the video, providing a twist that set up the theme for the first half of the video — you never know what to expect on any given day. I then interspersed the remaining three snippets around short comments from other interviewees that reinforced the notion that there really is no “typical day.”
Via this approach, I used the first interviewee’s comment to thread together the first half of the video. The music selection and deployment also added a little bit of playfulness to the opening. Then, in the second half, the video transitioned to hammering home the idea that PhD students have skills that are valuable to employers outside academia, which was one of the main messages the event series tries to convey. Finally, I added a post-credit callback to the first alumnus, just to add a little bit more playfulness by leaning into his self-effacing vibe.
Here’s the final video. Again, it’s not the best or most visually exciting video, but sometimes your best work lies in making something out of very little, and I was happy I was able to create a consistent theme throughout this piece.