Whether it’s marketing your business, sharing your own personal brand, making a political argument, or selling a product, all videos tell a story. And whether you are an individual or brand looking to create beautiful and effective stories, you don’t need to turn to feature filmmaking— Instagram stories is an ideal space to master your technique.
Great storytelling doesn’t apply only to movies
That said, one of the simplest ways to learn how to create great Instagram stories is to watch movies religiously and study the methods and means at work: note the story structure, character journeys, how the director has framed the shots, and edited everything together in a satisfying and striking way that causes the audience to feel something or do something.
Discover aesthetic instagram story background template with Mojo App. Mojo App is a great place to start for an aesthetic background template for Instagram stories. Templates are important because they can underpin the basis of your storytelling journey. A consistent look and feel for all your stories in a particular campaign will hugely empower the success of your efforts.
Open the Mojo app, pick a template that appeals to you, and easily make custom edits from there. And, once you’re ready to take your storytelling to the next level, here are some tips gleaned from Hollywood professionals.
1. Set the tone
Templates are a simple and ideal method to set the mood and tone—the look and feel that best carries your brand or message—something that takes millions of dollars to achieve in professional filmmaking.
Whether you’re simply showcasing your recent travels to Europe to your friends, or spotlighting your business and launching a new product, you can easily customize ready-made templates to achieve the look that you want.
2. Story is key
Although Instagram story videos are limited to only 15 seconds in length—as opposed to the 90 minutes of a typical feature film—that shouldn’t stop you from following the classic storytelling model of beginning, middle, end.
The goal is to captivate the viewer throughout your video, don’t lose them in the first few seconds, keep them involved all the way through and “seal the deal” with a simple call to action at the end.
3. Hollywood editing works
The idea of slaving away for hours on film industry standard editing tools like Final Cut, Avid, or Premiere Pro is enough to put anyone off creating short video stories. Don’t be intimidated, however, these types of editing packages are often far too complicated for the average video creator, take professional training and many hours of practice to understand and master, and are total “overkill” for the ordinary Instagram storyteller.
With free, online, simple video editors such as the Mojo Insta-editor or Clipchamp—which Microsoft has just purchased and will integrate with Windows and other product offerings available through Microsoft 365—you can put your 15 second “movie” masterpiece together in a matter of minutes.
