Speaker 1: I'm Sue O'Hara, Henniger's in-house writer-producer, and today I'm going to walk you through creating and using a two-column script. We're going to get started. We've got just a totally blank Word document in front of us to start with, and let's pretend in our scenario today that you're a communications professional and you've been asked to produce a two-minute video about a new scheduling tool that your company's rolling out. It's going to give everybody a lot more flexibility in how they work. So to get started with this script, you're going to want to do it before you really shoot anything in reality. For the sake of this exercise, I'm going to pretend that we've shot some interviews already, but in reality, this is a really great way to just kickstart a project and get started in earnest. It's going to allow you to get organized and kind of really think through all the different things that are going to help you tell your story. So interviews, narration, music, as well as stock footage. Maybe you've got great stuff in your company archives that you can use for the project. Maybe you're going to need to find a lot of stuff or license a lot of stuff. So this is kind of where you start to put all of that down on paper. And now the reason that it's great to do this early is that a lot of people, they know what they want to say, you know what I mean? And they go to it, they start a Word document, and it's just narration, narration, narration. They know exactly what they want to talk about. And then they hand it to an editor and say, okay, I'm ready to do the video. And the editor's first thought was, well, what are my visuals going to be? Maybe there are interview bites, but do you really want to look at the same person while they get through a 45 second piece of interview audio? You've got to start to think about visuals. And I think that this two column script format really does help you think about that and think about it early. So we've got our blank document. Let's get started. First thing I'm going to do is give this a title, scheduling video, and then identify this as a draft script and give it a date. What I typically also do here is make a note about what version of the video this version of the script matches up to. I like to go in and revisit my script and keep it updated as we start to edit and different versions of the video are going to the client. So in this case, I would maybe say something like this matches rough cut V2 delivered 52220. It makes it easy for you if you keep the script updated at the end when you've got to prep the script for narration and you've got to prep a transcript essentially for captioning, you're pretty much already there on paper. It's helpful if the client kind of says, hey, I'd really love a finished script, which I've had happen a number of times. So it just kind of saves you a little bit of trouble. And also keeping versions throughout the project, if anything goes wrong, or there's a question as to when you decided not to use a certain line of VO or a certain element, you can kind of go back and figure out where decisions were made, which for me, I always really like to do. So because we're starting totally from scratch on here, I'm going to delete this. And our next thing is going to be inserting columns. So I'm going to go up here to table. I'm going to insert table. I'm going to give it three columns and 10 rows. Put it in there. First thing I'm going to do is make this first column really small. We're not going to need it until the very end of the process. That's my bonus column. And then we're going to label this first one visuals and this other one audio. And I'll just center that, make it look nice. And now we've basically got our structure all set up. So the next thing I'm going to go up here and do is save my project. Now I've created just kind of a dummy folder for this. I typically, I have a big file structure of folders for each of my clients, folders for years, because in some cases I've worked with clients over and over again year by year, or depending on how much work I've done with that client by the individual project. In this case, I'm going to kind of save my file in a similar manner. I'm going to create a fake corporation called Sucorp. And this is going to be a scheduling project. And then I'm going to give it a date. And I like to save things by date versus using versions. I think version numbers can get neglected really easily, but dates, thankfully, you can go back and you can match them up with the date you got a specific email or you've got a specific set of changes. And I think that those milestones in time can be really, really helpful. So now we've got our structure basically set up here. The next thing we're going to do, let's talk about all the different things that could go into this project. So imagining all the visuals we might have, we'll have interviews that we've already shot, we'll have photos, we'll have stock footage, and we're probably going to have some on-screen graphics or text. And in the audio column, you know, we're going to have audio from the interviews we've already shot. You know, most of the time that stays married to the video, but maybe you want to mix it up. Maybe you want to use a quote and instead show pictures. You can do that. Narration and then also music. So in this case, we're going to pretend that this video starts with a quote on screen with a photo background, right? So those are two elements for our visual column. We've got the quote itself and we've got the photo we're going to put behind it. So our quote, I'm cutting and pasting from notes. So if my eyes go back and forth, you understand. I don't want you guys to have to see me type, type, type too much. And then I know that the background that I want for this quote is a file that right now is called background clock 1.jpg. I'm not going to put anything in the audio column. I don't want the narrator to read this. I just want people to read it off the screen. So for now, that's kind of our kickoff. We're ready to move on to the next cell in our script. So let's say next we want to put an interview bite in here from one of the people that we've interviewed on camera. Now a wonderful, totally made-up lady named Sharon Smith had this to say. I think every day is an opportunity, but it's not just an opportunity to plow through a list of work tasks and meetings from nine to five. You should have the flexibility as a trusted employee to choose where, when, and how you work, right? So she's kicking off this idea that this is this great new scheduling tool. Maybe Sharon is the head of HR for Sucor. Who knows? What I'm going to do for the editor is let them know that this is a quote from Sharon Smith. And I'm going to make sure, because I have done my due diligence in going through all of the camera files to find these wonderful quotes, I'm going to just note exactly which camera file this quote came from for my editor. So that should make it really easy for the editor to be able to go into their file structure at the beginning of the project and find exactly the person and the exact quote that I want here. I might even put the exact time codes that I have for this. Let's say I have the time codes. I might put that in there too. And I would say this is probably about a 15 second long, totally made up quote. Put that something like that in there so that it's really, really easy for them to find it. Transcripts are really helpful as well. Obviously, if you're doing interviews, I would always recommend doing transcripts. One of the things I'll talk about at the end is kind of where I like to correlate all of the different pieces that go into a video like this for the editor, for anybody who has to come into the video, process, and get up to speed fast. I'll cover that closer to the end of the video. So, okay, we've got our quote in there and our graphic on screen. We've got a person saying an actual thing. Now, there's one thing that I feel like is missing from this second line. I would love to have a graphic on screen that really drives home what she's saying at the end of this quote, that you should be able to choose where, when, and how you work, right? So, I'm going to make another note to the editor in here in the visuals column and mention that I want this as text on screen. If I have a really strong feelings about how that appears on screen or how that animates on, I can put them here. If I want to leave it up to the editor, I can make it something simple like this and I think they're going to get the gist of what I'm saying. So, now my next line might be from a narrator. And let's say our narrator wants to say this. You know, our new scheduling tool will allow you to make room in your daily schedule for the things that matter to you. This could include continuing education, child care, exercise, or working a four-day work week instead of a five-day week. So, that's a nice bit of narration, but our very next question is going to be what do we want to show when we have this, you know, being talked about? So, my first thought for something like this is, well, I want to see people doing all these great life-enriching things instead of being completely tied to a computer from nine to five every day. So, I will have gone out to a stock footage site and I will have, you know, found a number of clips I think would work well for my project and I'll have those here and I'll make a little note saying that I found these on Pond5. Again, I'll probably give the editor a little bit more direction in terms of how to find those resources that I've set aside for them at Pond5, how to access those clips, but for now, this is good enough in terms of direction. And so, right now, we've got a really good start, I think, on this script. We've got some graphics, we've heard from a real person, we're reinforcing what they're saying with another graphic, and then we've got a piece of narration and some stock footage that I think is going to really nicely illustrate what the person is talking about. And then, you know, this is the point at which, as a producer, as a writer, as a communications person writing a script, you're going to go through this and reorder things and change things around and, you know, type things and realize you don't like it and delete it and move this part up front. I would do all of that. And when you get close to the end and you feel like, man, this is really something that I feel good about and I'm almost ready to send it to somebody to look it over, to review it, to give me feedback on it, that's where I would go back to this first column and I would number these columns. Now, the reason I do it last is because, obviously, if you move things around a bunch, you end up having to redo this. You end up having to redo the numbers over and over again, which is very annoying. But in this case, you know, we've only done three cells, so we're not put out by it. This numbering really helps when you are on a quick call with a client and they have a quick question about line number two. I don't like that piece of B-roll. Can we switch something out? As you move things around in the script, you can, and then sequentially keeping copies of the script that match the video. If you ever get to a point where you're like, man, why did we move that here? Or what were we thinking? You kind of have a historical record to look back on and understand why you moved things around or how you moved things around, which I think is sometimes really helpful in terms of being able to look back at decisions you've made and say, I get it. I know what I did. Now, the last thing in terms of more notes for the editor and for anybody who may be on the client side, they start on this project, they get a new job, they move to a new team, the project goes on hold for a month, a new employee comes along and they've got to pick this up midstream or an editor starts working on it, and then they have to move on to something else and a new editor is going to pick it up. I like to use this space just underneath the script for lots and lots of notes. So in this case, I might have links to a couple different stock footage resources. I would have links in there to the exact bin that I have set aside of footage for this specific project, but then that gives the editor kind of a one-click easy, let me see what she had set aside for this. I might also say where the music I was imagining for this lives. Where am I going to ultimately have to license this music from? The editors have the benefit of a huge After Effects project or a Adobe Premiere project where there's lots of clues in the file names and stuff of where things came from. They have metadata and things that as a producer, it's very easy to lose track of. So if you're the one looking for the music and you give that track to somebody and then two months later you're coming back and you're trying to license it, it's always great to keep notes for yourself on where you got that in the first place. I think I mentioned this earlier, we typically get all of our interviews transcribed and we will use Rev.com for that. Rev is great because you can send links of those transcripts to people. If you have a big team that all wants to look at the interviews, they can all follow those links. That's another thing that I might put in here is where exactly those transcripts live. It kind of keeps you from having to keep emailing them to people as team members change or keep reminding people where they are in an internal server. Then lastly, you choose narration talent at a certain point in a project. Maybe you reach out to somebody and you say, hey, I've got this great project I'm working on and we'd love for you to be the voice and they say, awesome, but I'm on vacation in a month and a half. Do you think that's when your video is going to be finished up? You're like, I don't exactly know. You can always A, note who the client has picked for narration talent, but you could also say something like on vacation, second week of August so that as you keep going back into the script and you keep marching towards your deadline, you realize like, oh, that's a scheduling point that I've got to keep in mind. So here we are. That's, I think, a good start on a script for any kind of project, communications project, explainer video, anything that would benefit from this two-column format. So that's it. If you guys like this video, please like it, subscribe to our channel. We have more videos coming up about the production and post-production process. We have a number of videos kind of already in our channel, specifically about the processes editors go through to prep things for color and for mix, proxy files, whole bunch of good stuff there. Thanks so much and hope to see you guys soon. Thanks. Bye.