The Purpose of Visual Storytelling
02/18/09 03:02:05 PMWhen Raj and I discuss the purpose of visual storytelling, we see five different reasons for businesses to deploy the solution:
Show the Unseeable
In many cases, visual storytelling allow you to show concepts that a human eye couldn’t actually see.
- Speed of events: the events take place at a pace which is too fast (or too slow) for the human eye.
- Inaccessible location/perspective: you can’t look inside a working jet engine nor can you see events that happen mid-air or underground
- Scale: Some events are too small (or too large) for us to perceive.
- Safety: Some views would put users at-risk to experience them.
Describe an Experience that Can’t Be Seen . . . Yet
When the Dallas Cowboys built their New Stadium, they wanted to win the rights to a SuperBowl before the stadium existed. How do you showcase the potential SuperBowl game-day experience before the building has been built? You can’t just take a picture or make a movie of the stadium.
You have to rely on digital and visual storytelling tools to recreate the environment and generate the excitement. That’s what we did when we created the Dallas Cowboys’ digital animation of their new stadium.
Make an Abstract Concrete
Often, information comes from multiple sources: real world images, digital elements, databases. Visual storytelling allows companies to merge these datastreams and weave together a story.
Explaining Concepts
Visual storytelling can explain processes without a need for language (or where necessary languages can be localized). In many cases, the same immersive digital training environment can be used in the United States, Brazil and China–with only small changes for language and culture.
Guide a Viewer’s Focus
We’ve adopted a lot of techniques in print to guide a viewer’s focus–bolded section headers, bullet-lists, etc. However, it’s still easy to confuse a reader. Visual storytelling can guide a viewer’s perpective to the key elements that are important about a concept. For example, Neoscape created a 3D animation for William and Mary’s Mason School of Business. It’s an excellent example of visual storytelling that allows users to see related elements–classrooms, offices, etc . . . because the animation guides the viewer through color-highlighting. You don’t have to be an architect to understand the blueprints.
