Whenever I sit down to craft a story, be it for a personal project or for a commercial assignment, I like to use the four pillars of storytelling as a basic framework. The four pillars are people, places, plot, and purpose. You need a balance between these four, go too heavy on one of them and you will inevitably have an unbalanced story, a story that doesn’t feel “right” or even worse, one that doesn’t elicit any emotion in your audience.

For the past two years, I have been increasingly working on commercial projects, telling stories to help sell a product or service. One of the many challenges when telling the story of any given product is to avoid being too purpose heavy: “This is my stuff, my stuff is awesome, buy my stuff!”. Yes, that is definitely the purpose of every commercial video, but sometimes taking the direct and often overused approach is not the best way to get your point across.

I often find myself gravitating towards stories that are more character-driven; I tend to develop a stronger emotional connection with such stories, and that’s what I would love the audience to do when they watch any of my commercial work. The objective is to put a face to a product or service, to give the audience someone to identify with and care about. Developing a balanced story in a commercial setting is rarely easy but it’s always rewarding. I look forward to the challenge of creating more compelling and relatable advertising.