FIT | BRAVE | GROUNDED | GLOBAL

What is the value of a storytelling approach?

My name is Mathew Welsh and I started Journeyman Film Company in 2008.  I believe that embracing the hero's journey will help organizations be smarter when they use video to connect with audiences. What is the classic hero's journey story? A character faces a daunting challenge, debates whether or not to take it on, then works through trials and tribulations to eventually overcome obstacles to arrive at a new place, a changed person. We've all seen that story thousands of times. Think "Rocky"... or the Budweiser Clydesdale & Puppy superbowl commercial!

What I find cool is that the hero's journey mirrors what marketers call the customer journey.  A marketer's brief will ask: where is your audience now, and where do you want to take them? A good video story is a powerful tool that moves your target audience in the right direction. It takes them on a journey that resonates for them. That can shift a point of view and change the perception of ideas, places, products, and organizations. 

The thing is, it's actually hard to do with real people stories, and that's why not a lot of video production companies do it.

After a decade in documentary Film/TV, a lot of people asked me: "why would an award winning doc filmmaker do corporate work?" Some folks in the TV/film business might think of corporate video production as lower-status or less creative - but that's not my view. I had success with documentary films, winning a Gemini Award in 2000, and I could have continued doing work for TV, but I wanted to bring a filmmaker's palette to company brand stories, to see where it could lead.

I want to offer that story discipline to our clients, so we can move beyond "corporate video" to create content that feels more human. What clients overwhelmingly love about our approach is that it doesn't feel "corporate." Organizations are made up of human beings, after all, but it doesn't always feel that way in video content. We've learned at Journeyman that all audiences respond when they watch a human journey of transformation. That's the key.

I decided to build a team, starting with one employee in 2008. Over a decade we grew to 17 employees!!! We made a ton of fantastic video content over those years, and many creative people came through our doors to collaborate. We travelled far and wide. We met people from all walks of life -- from Navy Divers to CEOs, doctors to engineers, farmers to Gambian children and First Nations leaders.

As I personally shifted away from hands-on production to lead a growing company, there were many ups and downs. I learned a lot about business and strategy and my own limitations and strengths. Our creative people brought ideas to the table that I never dreamed of. In turn, I drove a lot of employees crazy with my obsession with story structure. It led to spirited debates about the need for story. After all, some argued, not every piece of video content needs it. Lots of content is moving, beautiful, cool and creative, without a specific story. Lots of video is utilitarian, or funny, or novel, and gets an audience without having a specific story structure. But I was committed to making "build your story" the focus for Journeyman, to help our clients really connect to audiences with relevant content.

We built a great reputation for client service and video quality. And we delivered A LOT of content. But at the end of our busiest year in 2018-2019, I asked Oren, head of production, what projects he was most proud of in the past year. He confessed that some of the content was starting to feel a bit "corporate," and different from the early Journeyman work. Our growth and operations had perhaps led us away from that story focus. Also that year, a couple of major clients pulled back on their video content needs at the same time, for unrelated circumstantial reasons. (Their circumstances changed, it was nothing we did...!) Revenue declined. And then Covid-19 happened. So the company went through a major struggle and contracted. It was painful and challenging for me as the founder.

But through that change, I returned to work hands-on again on most of our projects. Now we're a tight collaborative group of creative freelancers who do solid work. And I get to produce and direct again, doing what I do best: building that story structure and elevating real people's stories.

And why do I love this work? I'll never forget some feedback I got from a Dutch Engineer named Joost. He was featured in a video project we did for the Shell joint venture project, LNG Canada. He was a reluctant participant on camera since he hadn't been featured in video before. But he agreed to the challenge, and he enjoyed it more than expected. And once his colleagues saw the finished video, they saw Joost in a new light. He too saw himself and his role in a new light. And his wife told him she finally had some sense of what he did at work!!! And most significantly, he told me that when the LNG Canada videos where shared internally among the executive folks at Shell who had to make a decision about whether or not to invest in the joint venture project, Joost said people saw the project differently, in no small part, because of our approach. The videos felt different and they were human, authentic, and not a slick corporate message. Joost assured me that our video work was instrumental in the overall effort that led to the biggest private industry investment in Canadian history: $40 Billion. That means Canada ships natural gas to Asia and helps reduce coal fired GHG emissions. Wow!

Video storytelling can be transformational. This is why Journeyman focuses on telling a human story. It's the main value we offer the world.