15 Years of AOS

Explore 15 years at The Art of Storytelling Inc. helping businesses find and tell their stories. Video and photography productionCommunicationsUser generated contentAOS Content Cloud AppThe future of storytellingInsights from AOS' foundersFeaturing: Miranda O’Connor, James O’ConnorHosted by: Julianne NealWe’ve kind of settled on this niche because we know that this is what gives us our greatest joy is helping people to discover their stories, and I think a lot of video production companies trust that the client actually knows what their story really is and is able to verbalize it and explain it. But I do find that a lot of people rely on us to help them to discover what is it that they actually want to say, and what is it that makes them special.Welcome all to the first episode of Video Storytelling for Community Engagement. A brand new podcast from the folks at AOS – the Art of Storytelling – which is run by my friends Miranda and James O’Connor. They are responsible for several award winning documentaries exploring such themes as youth development through sports and music, climate change, and equine therapy… but also for hundreds of videos for brands who want to leverage their story to make a greater impact. It’s been three years since they affectively moved their business and their lives from the Caribbean to Canada, six years since we last met at the Equus Film Festival in Camden, South Carolina, and an amazing 15 year journey for these two entrepreneurs, which I can’t wait to share with you right now.You know we started this business on my mother’s dining room table many many years ago and we didn’t start off doing video stories. We started doing graphic design and then we started to do web design and we were doing web hosting at a point… so we really have done quite a lot of different things before we got to where we are today and what started as as photography then went into video. I do remember you know, the first time that we decided to invest in a digital camera. This is when digital cameras were becoming more available and it was so expensive we had to go to the bank and get a loan. And in those days we didn’t have any money we didn’t really know what we were doing and we kind of just like had faith that it was going to work and we went and borrowed money. We bought our first digital camera and I think it was like 3 or maybe 2 mega pixels like something ridiculous, you know and it cost it cost a huge amount of money in those days and I told him… I said, you know you, you better learn how to use this camera and make back this money. And he did, you know? And it just kind of went from there.But you know, coming up to the point where we met you and Bruce, we were doing a lot of business videos, business stories, we were doing some social responsibility videos for some of the bigger companies. We had started doing a lot of oil and gas and financial work and government work. But you know, the business stories are kind of where it evolved from. That’s like that’s what we draw on mostly. A lot of it is in the editing, but a lot of it is also in who we bring into these stories. Who are the stakeholders that we bring in to interview to form a really good narrative about the brand.People might take that for granted, but I wanted to say that a lot of the times we’re doing it in real time. So yes, we do put a lot of effort into the pre production side of it to make sure that we’re going to nail all of the objectives and everything. But because it’s a very organic process where… You don’t know what stakeholders are going to say. Ultimately, you don’t know what the what response you are going to get, and that’s what makes it so exciting and engaging because you’re literally discovering something as this thing unfolds, and so you you have to be on your toes. You have to be dynamic and you have to kind o