WRITING FOR VIDEO: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

You write what you write, and that’s that. When your story reaches a natural or supernatural conclusion, kill it off. Stake it, in the case of the supernatural ending.

   When is a piece of writing finished? Depends on what you are writing. A lean novel is cooked at 75,000 words. An extra 25,000 on top of that is pudding – make sure it isn’t mere froth.

   In cinema, a page of script is a minute on the screen. Your 900-page epic on the life of a coffee shop has too much life in it. Cut to the bone. Or to the coffee bean. To the chase.

   When the writing is just a little over, circumcise it – after all, you aren’t the one feeling the pain…and if you are, you are doing it wrong. I think we’re belabouring the imagery if I say an editor should develop a thick skin.

   Down in the world of the very short story, how much should you write? I considered this when writing video scripts. It’s no secret that this blog was modelled on radio – specifically on what the journalist Alistair Cooke managed in decades of weekly broadcasting.

   I wouldn’t always write to a minimum limit – life gets in the way. But when I did write to a limit, hell, that limit was at least 1,500 words. Yes, I’d write more than that. I am, after all, a wordy cove.

   Now I make videos that run around ten minutes on YouTube, and writing 1,500 words covers the time nicely. There’s room for a pause or three, but 150 words should span a minute of audio without difficulty.

   Pacing is important. What the hell am I doing, though? I come up with a story. There’s a topic worth considering. Just exactly what the hell are dice, anyway? I’ll lay out a few items I want to talk about. And I’ll think about filming with particular camera set-ups and certain props.

   The story takes shape. There’s a lot of research. If I’m backing up a point from my own experience, that’s standard. It’s folly to discuss matters outside your experience as if they are inside it. So, yes, start with what you know. And, double-yes, do your research in case what you know is blatantly bullshit.

   It’s true that I pepper these video talks with boardgaming and roleplaying facts you won’t find anywhere else. I hope it is obvious that when I describe something as a gaming fact, I am, to use a technical term, taking the piss.

   What consumes the time? Research. With the research done, it’s time to write up a script. For the most part, I’ll write first and film later. Then I’ll edit the footage to match the audio recording.

   Sometimes I’ll film first, and then construct a story around the footage. It’s useful to see how much footage there is, and plan a chunk of writing accordingly. Whether the tail wags the dog or the dog wags the tail, from a distance you still see a four-legged animal…

   It little matters which process comes first. Script meets film in editing, regardless.

   I say that, but it isn’t entirely true. Rarely, I’ve recorded the audio track without a script. This calls for a chunk of audio editing as well as the film work, and I hardly ever take this approach. I’ll return to the topic in a moment.

   My first video script was 1,200 words…a little on the short side. But the video was a quarter of an hour long. Next, I wrote almost 1,900 words and finished that second video in eleven minutes.

   Those were the early efforts. I have a sense that I was all over the place, even though I planned to write 1,500 words to cover around ten minutes of film. What of the latest video I filmed? The script is almost 1,900 words long, and the mini-movie runs for…yes, about eleven minutes. Almost the same as my second video.

   Not counting omnibus editions, what’s my longest video? A piece on dead characters in roleplaying games. I spent over half an hour reading from a pile of dead character sheets. The script was only 38 words long – an introduction. Then I worked my way through the obituaries freeform. The character sheets provided the script.

   Collaboration extends the duration. For a video on Tourette Syndrome and gaming, I wrote 1,900 words, but the additional footage by Melissa C. Water, my collaborator, took the finished video to 23 minutes.

   Speaking of footage, how much do I film? I expect to film twice as much material as I use. That doesn’t mean the footage is ignored. For a shot of a prop, I’ll film for twelve seconds to be sure of getting ten seconds I can use.

   To match that shot to the audio, I’ll cut the scene down to five seconds. Yes, I’ve seen videos by people who put one image up for the duration of their talk. But I can’t do that. Running a shot for half a minute feels like eternity.

   What method do I favour? Writing the script and then filming the video, knowing what I am aiming for in matching visuals to the audio. Then I can go daft in the editing. Exceptionally rarely, I’ll have to cut part of the script after the fact.

   It’ll occur to me that a vague-ism has crept into the narrative, and it has to go. The audio is edited, mostly to remove coughs and splutters, but I seldom edit the audio when it is matched to the video track.

   You’ll have that awkward moment in which you realise what you are saying isn’t what you thought you meant to imagine you’d believed you were rumoured to have planned all along. In short, you realise you are talking utter bollocks.

   If I talk utter bollocks in the published video, that’s my problem. I haven’t taken a video down yet. For legal reasons, you must be aware of legal reasons.

   So where do we stand in all this, if I am giving advice for beginners making videos? Start with story. Research. Write your script. As a very rough guide, aim for 150 words per minute of film. I record the audio separately so that I can hop from one point to the next using a visual shift.

   How long does it all take? It takes for-absolutely-ever. I write these scripts in files with single spacing, wrapping up 1,500 words on the third page. The typing itself doesn’t take long, but the research that leads me there lasts forever plus one day.

   In terms of reading the script aloud, I’ll speak for around twelve minutes when delivering a ten-minute talk. Two minutes disappear in audio editing, when I cut the long pause before the sneeze, the sneeze, an aftershock of a sneeze, blowing my noise in as undignified a manner as I can manage, and a long pause as eye-watering settles down.

   I also fluff lines. And I pause while I scroll another screen full of dialogue into position. Occasionally I wait for a noisy aircraft to half-fly overhead. With audio in the bag, I almost always immediately edit that file.

   If you record at the top of the hour, you’ll use a quarter of that hour nailing the basics down by the time you start to edit. When the audio is unusable – and that’s a blue moon event – it’s back to the microphone, with adjustments.

   Editing audio for a minute adds two minutes to the process. Grab your starting duration and triple it. Don’t be surprised if you take a whole hour to record and then edit your fourteen minutes of waffle down to a ten-minute talk.

   Video production is glacial. I’ll know, from the number of words, and the stacking of props, that I am in for a long video recording session. The video on cardboard screens for roleplaying games has a script that’s 4,700 words long.

   If we’re strolling through audio at the rate of 150 words a minute, you’d expect to make a video that runs 31 and a third minutes according to the mystical calculations. In the end, I recorded 37 minutes of footage for a video edited to last a shade under 30 minutes. The estimate worked out, more or less, in that case.

   There is a sense, when making longer videos, recording longer audio sections, that you’ll pace yourself well enough once you are into the swing of things. It’s the shorter videos you’ll rattle through, runaway-train-style, burning up your script at a ridiculous rate of knots.

   I avoid super-short videos. If the script is a third shorter than usual, the finished video is half-length instead of a third shorter. With fewer words in play, there’s far less scope for the dramatic pause. All you can do is rattle through. I learned that from listening to radio. Up to a point, silence on radio is definitely dramatic. Then deafening. And after that, you reach for the switches to see if your radio stopped working.

   And that thought carries me across the 1,500 threshold. How long would this blog post last if I converted it into a video? Let us find out…I’ll add it to the queue.