The reason your videos don’t hold attention

The reason your videos don’t hold attention is because you're using the wrong story arc.

In school, we’re taught a story arc that looks like this👇🏻

Initial conflict, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution. 

This traditional story arc was the gold standard for a classic story (per Hollywood and Disney).

But here’s the problem…

That traditional story arc doesn’t work anymore because social media nuked our attention spans.

This is what happens when a modern brain consumes a story told in the traditional arc.

Most people scroll away before the rising action ever gets good.

So instead, on social media, you want to tell your stories using the modern story arc. Here’s how it works…

First 5 Seconds

The modern story arc skips the initial conflict and rising action slow ascension.

When you’re in a movie theater, they can afford to slow build plot for 30 minutes because they have you held captive underneath a bucket of popcorn.

On social media, you can’t start the story at zero.

Instead, the modern story arc throws you right into the thick of it from second number one, with enough subject clarity in the hook to give 70% context immediately.

The first five seconds need to feel like you're getting dropped in the middle of a story that's already started so the comprehension and context clarity happens much faster.

Next 10 Seconds

In the next 5-10 seconds, you need to spike the viewer to 90% intensity out of 100. We’re moving at Fast & Furious speeds here. 

You want this to be something contrarian, a shocking stat…something to release that initial hit of dopamine in the viewer's brain. This is the first local peak in the story.

Next 20-30 Seconds

After you build up to an interesting reveal, you release that tension for 10-15 seconds, and then boom, another peak.

You then repeat this for the 60-90 seconds of your video over and over. Peak, release, peak, release, until the video is done.

In the modern era, the climax doesn't happen in the middle of the story. Instead, you're stacking mini peaks on top of each other, rehooking the viewer as often as you can.

This is the formula for storytelling in an environment where you have to re-earn viewer attention every 10 seconds.

If you want to learn the modern story arc more in depth, here’s a video I made breaking it down (LINK). This will help your storytelling a lot!

Keep going 🫡