At Cognitive we are ultimately a company of visual thinkers. We use pictures and images to supercharge stories for our clients, but that is literally only half of the story, it's not the whole picture!

At the 2018 Golden Globe Awards Oprah Winfrey received the prestigious Cecil B. DeMille award and gave an emotional and inspiring speech exploring issues of race, gender and other social and political hot topics, such as sexual misconduct. The speech may actually be the defining speech of the #MeToo campaign and it has hit a zeitgeist, which exploded across the media. It is the essence of good storytelling and it draws upon classical forms of stylistic writing to hammer home her message and connect directly with a wider audience.

Being able to write strong narratives that resound with an audience is so important. As we can hear in Oprah's speech, the style is as important as the content. As a lecturer in public speaking, Dr Matt McGarritty writes, "That chance to say just the right thing, in just the right way, at just the right time. Classical rhetors chased Kairos; trained for it." [NOTE; Kairos is an Ancient Greek word meaning the right, critical, or opportune moment]

We have a lot of experience in turning apparently dry content into supercharged communications with the transformative power of pictures. But what happens when you have narrative and delivery that is already supercharged? We loved Oprah’s message and think she has hit the Kairos.

So with such a great 'script' to start with, we could not resist seeing what illustration and animation could do to Oprah's story. We took the liberty of making a short animation of the first paragraph of her speech to see if we could connect with the emotion of her story, whist still delivering an information rich and connected narrative.

We hope you enjoy!