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.
No comments:
Post a Comment