How to Write a Video Script, or, Words Only When Necessary
At some point in your communications career, you will be faced with writing a video script. It comes with the territory. How you respond to this distraught pleasure will say a lot about you and your understanding of visual media.
What makes writing an av script hard is not knowing how easy it can be. By the very nature of the written word for a visual medium, the key to success is less, not more.
For one thing, you’re writing to be heard, not seen. For another, the medium is a visual one, which means it prefers the pictures to do the talking. Finally, a script for video needs a lot more than just words. It has to provide visual direction, audio direction, and the essential creative blueprint that leads to the success of the project.
Let me give you an example.
Let’s say that your goal is to write a short script about a new software program that helps people track their spending. Let’s call it “Fast Money”.
It’s a simple, easy to use program which can help people budget, save, an ultimately have the money they need to fulfill their dreams.
The success of all video or audio-visual products is to engage the audience by appealing to their desires. You could talk about how “Fast Money” has been written by coders certified in C++, how it is delightful in its use of a user-friendly GUI, and how it automatically sends back error messages to “Fast Money” HQ so that the program can be constantly improved.
But you’d be talking to yourself, because the potential buyer doesn’t care about any of that. They care about money. Their money. Their life. Their future.
SO you need to create a hook. A way to start the script that talks right to them and their needs.
SO you begin writing:
ANNOUNCER: You want to make Money! VISUAL: Picture of Dollar Bill. SOUND EFFECT: Ka-Ching. MUSIC: Money, by Pink Floyd.
Well, it’s a start, if you want to hit your audience with a sledgehammer.
But hitting audiences with sledgehammers doesn’t create intrigue. But this is often the approach an unseasoned writer will take– they’ll cover all the bases.
The good news is, luckily, you don’t need to know or present all those technical facts. What you need is a way to engage the audience on their terms.
Instead, try writing without using words– ie, skip the narrator for now and create a scene instead.
SCENE: Slow zoom in on man working at kitchen table, He has a yellow legal pad, a checkbook, and a calculator. He looks worried and is wiping imaginary sweat from his brow. A woman, his wife, walks in behind him and looks over his shoulder.
SHE: Well?
HE: It doesnt look good.
ANNOUNCER: Too familiar? It’s hard to save a buck these days.
VISUAL: Alternating closeups of Husband and Wife faces, cutaway to their checkbook showing small negative balance, cutaway to pile of bills.
Now, that was fun! Instead of a litany of facts and figures, suitable only for the engineer that developed the product, we’ve now created an emotional scenario almst anyone running a household can identify with. They’re ready to hear more.
And we didn’t use corny music, jangling cash registers, overblown prose, or dollars marching off a cliff.
Now you’re on your way to being a scriptwriter. Yes, you have to know the facts. But no, the audience doesn’t need all of them. They need reasons to care. And you’ve just given that to them.
Now, they’ll listen to more– even if there are a few facts thrown in.
For more information on this and other create techniques to make your video production life easier, see my book, “Tribute Videos for Fun and Profit”, elsewhere on this site.
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PSSST….Are You Packin’ Cam?
Are you packin’?
Your video camera, that is.
Your camera– and your right to use it– is as important to many of us as our right to pack heat– uh, carry a concealed weapon, that is. And no, I don;t pack heat.
But I do pack cam, and that can be just as important. With it, you can:
* Capture a family moment.
* Witness a crime.
* Record breaking news or a natural disaster.
* Make a personal statement by pointing the camera at yourself.
* Record a coworkers moment of triumph.
* Surreptitiously record b-roll for a company video.
* Ask Grandma 20 questions for posterity before she shuffles off to Baltimore.
* Narrate your own personal documentary.
* Record something worth 100,000 hits on YouTube (like that territorial squirrel fight I saw– and missed– the other day. I forgot to pack cam.)
So pack cam. The links you gain, the views you rank, even the money you make from a once in a lifetime catch, is worth only the amount of cam you take.
Slide Show Case History: A Family Tribute
This family history DVD was created as a Christmas gift from parents to their sons and daughter and their childrens’ children. What an amazing and thoughtful gift. While it preserves photos and especially 8mm films that had not been seen in decades, the larger story is the interviews from the parents that pepper the story. This excerpt hopefully will give you the flavor of a compelling, lasting keepsake not possible in any other way.
Maybe They Won’t Skip Our Commercials If We MAKE THEM LOUDER
Once again, there is an uproar over the “loudness” of commercials versus the loudness of the programs in which those programs reside.
As the keeper of the remote, I have spent a lifetime hearing “turn that damn thing down” whenever commercials come on.
Here’s the secret: they aren’t louder. Well, technically. TV spots are just as loud as tv shows… t their “peak volume”, The trick is– tv spots are all at peak volume…. through a technical audio processing technique called “compression.”
So while 24 has a peak volume of uns being fired and Jack dshouting and bombs detonating and stuff blowing up, it also has low peak volume of Jack muttering under his breath, “With all due respect Madam President, ask around.”
Then, a few seconds later, he yells “We don’t have time!!!” at the peak of his lungs.
So TV spots are the equivilant of Jack Bauer yelling “we don’t have time!” for 60 seconds straight.
Slide Show Secrets Podcast 1: Introduction
Recorded in my mobile recording studio outside of Stop & Shop, Phillipsburg, NJ. An Introduction to SlideShow Secrets
“Edit Like a Pro”– the Software Package Promise
I just got a sales email from a software company telling me that if I bought their video editing software, I would be “editing like a pro.”
Well, that’s great. Because I figure, I’ve been doing this video thing for about 30 years now, and at this point, I hope I am a pro, so that I don’t need to edit “like” one.
Slideshows Will Explain It All– Introducing Slideshow Secrets
From Slideshow Secrets–
Through video, “electronic” presentations, Powerpoint, web video, DVD’s, iPods, and cell-phone mobile messaging, the rules have stayed pretty much the same. I won’t argue that you don’t create differently for a phone than you would a 70 foot panoramic screen.
But the basics are there, and we’re going back to basics.
What Slideshow Secrets is about is using the language of slides– which does include sound– to learn how to tell a story.
The Video Script as Marketing Plan
Scriptwriting is the art and craft of extrapolating a creative approach into a working creative plan. A script is more than just the words. It is the blueprint that indicates the structure or flow of your video, what kinds of shots are necessary, what kinds of graphics are appropriate, and what types of music might be used or created.
REVIEW: One True Media– On-Line Slide Show Builder
I have strong opinions as to what makes a real slide-sound show, and while this isn’t quite it, it is the first on-line offering that seems to get some of the sync-sound concept. (Go to SLIDE-SOUND.COM for more of my thoughts on this.)
Slideshows, Slide-Sound Shows… Side Show? No……
Not only has the world of video become more affordable, so has the world of still photography. Now that it is all digital, we’ve said goodbye to slide projectors, Polaroid instant film cameras, and even double prints at the FotoMat. But what have we gained? Incredible quality digital cameras, minaturized storage, on-line albums and presentations, [...]