pillars

The four pillars are often used for storytelling. They exist of Place, People, Plot and Purpose. These four pillars can make or break a story. When applying these pillars in a good way your story will be able to attract people.

Information found about the pillar People:

Information found about the pillar Plot:

Information found about the pillar Purpose:

Every great book and every great movie has great characters. Even if your video is only two minutes long, you need a great character to tell a powerful story. Why?

Because we relate to people.

They have desires, emotions, and struggles just like

we do. We understand other people in a way we can’t understand or relate to animals, machines, or corporate entities.

Place is one of the keys to proper storytelling, and when combined with the other three pillars, it forms the foundation of every effective video.

Place builds directly on plot as we use it to visually represent each plot point in our story, it also helps us connect our audience to our character’s reality and it provides authenticity.

The more unexpected the place is, the better. If it’s expected, the audience sometimes can’t connect because it doesn’t draw them in. You want to be unexpected and try to create intrigue.

There are four different layers of using a place (as a symbol):
- Environments: The area the action occurs.
- Situations: The actions happening around the event.
- Objects: Something of particular importance to the character’s motivations.
- Time: The time the action occurs.

In our project the most important layer of the place is the

is about public objects that people have to touch to accomplish a certain goal, like the traffic light button to cross the road safely or the doorbell to let people know you arrived.

Place in our project

There are typically three traits that make a strong character:
- Desire. A strong desire leads to an emotional connection with the audience and creates empathy.
- Uniqueness. As people, we tend to be drawn to things that are new or different.
- Complexity. This is the “why” of the character.

People in our project

Our project is meant for everybody who has issues with touching public objects, actually it is made for everybody, because it influences our health as a society. We want to find a new way of using public touching points. Can we, with the technology we have these days, create new, better, more hygienic ways of using these objects?

Probably, if we had to write a story or make a video, the character would be somebody who would not look like somebody who is super aware of their hygiene, but further in the story you will see this character is very aware of their hygiene. It would be nice if the character would be unexpected within this subject of hygiene.

and it’s a critical element for engaging your

audience. As a storyteller, there are a couple of key decisions to be made about any story:

Plot is the structure of your story,

1. Which elements to include in the story (and which ones to exclude), and
2. How to arrange those elements into a clear beginning, middle, and end.

In our project/story is the conflict that people gain negative feelings when seeing or touching public objects. How to handle these feelings or even change them for the better? The plot then would be the "solution" or a new idea of how to behave around these public points.

One of the bigger conflicts when talking about traffic light buttons, is that people don't want to touch them, because of their hygiene, and therefor there health, but when not touching them and therefor crossing the road less safely, people risk to negatively influence their health as well.

A key thing you need in a story is conflict. Without conflict, your audience isn’t going to care about your story.

What's it about? What do you want to say with the story? Is it meant to be inspirational? Do you want to convey information? Or are you using the video for a commercial purpose to sell something?

The purpose of the video/project is the reason you are creating the video/project.

The challenging part of defining your purpose is that you have to narrow it down.
“We need to guide the heart to move the mind.”

Purpose in our project

Keywords: Negative feelings, Public objects, Hygiene, Change
We want to show new ways of using certain objects and show how things can be done different, for the better of our society, in the near by future. Within this project we want to make people think about how we use our public space and how some things are outdated and how with changes we can make our environment more hygienic.