Every now and then I get to write a script for a DVD. I’m not writing a big screen motion picture–we’re talking about the type of production known as an “industrial.” It’s a DVD prepared by a business for a specifically business purpose, usually for training but sometimes for promotion.
Hey, it’s still a script.
The big difference in writing a script versus writing an article is that you have the incredible power (and sometimes limitation) of having to work almost entirely in visuals and sound. A DVD works best when there is something to see. You want to show action because it’s action that tells the story. You can use sound (people talking, music, sound effects) to help support that, but the main thrust of the DVD script has to be describing the sequence of images that are going to tell the story.
It’s a lot different than writing an article.
Some things are meant for DVD and others are not. For instance, if I was tasked with communicating the molecular differences between morphine and heroin or if I were asked to explain the role of Catherine de Medici on French history, it would be massively easier to do it in words. There just aren’t that many gripping visual images to work with.
On the other hand, stories about patients or procedures or how to do things often work great on DVD. So how do you write an industrial DVD script? You start with a storyboard, a sort of comic-book version that lays out the movie. Some films get very detailed storyboards (maybe even frame-by-frame) but for industrial videos, you just want to lay out the main chapters or sequence. I have a budget for this project so I have a designer work with me to do the storyboard, but his job is just to draw some sketches to show the five or six main sections of the DVD. My job is to figure out what those five or six main sections are and how we are going to depict them.
This particular DVD is going to have some sections without sound and we’re going to put a voice/over narration to describe what’s going with it. This is a good trick for you industrial producers–it makes it way easier to translate the video down the road (you can just replace the voice/over track…voila, you’re done). I will write the voice/over script but I can’t do that very well now because we need to go out and gather the film and then write the voice/over as we decide what to show.
It’s a different world.
Now when it comes to structure, a DVD is similar to an article. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. You need to consider how you make the points, too, that is, you need to make your points effectively.
But a DVD is way different in that you can’t state, describe, or explain. You have to show. You can’t say, “Bill is nervous.” You have to find a way to show Bill and demonstrate through his actions that he is nervous. You can’t say “Bill is nervous about his taxes” but you can figure out a way to show a nervous Bill and somehow through a prop or some lines indicate that his concern is his taxes. But when you want to go really deep–say that Bill is nervous about his taxes because his dad went to prison years ago for tax evasion in a set-up that was planned by his mother–well, that’s tough to do in a DVD. You have to work that into dialog. But when you get too much into the heads of people, you need to think novel rather than film. That’s why I think novels are generally “better” than cinema, because there is more cerebral depth to them.
On the other hand, if you want to tell a story about a harrowing car chase, that’s made for film. If you have ever tried to write action-adventure novels, you know how tough it can be! I think that’s why graphic novels (comic books) were invented, to accommodate an action-oriented novel.
So now let’s come back to my industrial DVD. I need to push the story toward action and things I can show visually. If I need music and dialog to help, I should use it freely. That’s how you “write” a script.
