26 Aug How To Write A Corporate Video Script
So if you’ve landed on this blog post let’s assume you’ve been tasked with putting together a corporate video script and it’s a little outside your usual skillset.
Don’t worry, we get it – writing can be a pretty daunting task in itself, but beginning a fully fledged corporate video script assignment with the weight of your boss and colleagues’ opinions hanging over your head makes taking the first steps extra challenging.
If you’re working with a professional film or video production team, this is where you’d simply handball the task over to their scriptwriters. But if you’d like to draft a starting script before you start production, or you’re trying to work out production on your own, included below are a few handy tips on how to write a corporate video script to keep in mind before you begin. They should provide you with the necessary footing so you can take the right first steps towards creating a memorable video.
Planning
Before you place your fingers on the keyboard, it’s perhaps best to put pen to paper and jot down a few key goals that you want to set for yourself when writing the script. It might be to make sure you mention a certain point or address something particularly important, or it could be setting yourself a timeline to work within and a date to have the writing done by.
Map out what you want to achieve with the script and how you will go about doing that. Be concise, clear, critical, and direct in your approach. Organise your thoughts and refine your work. Decide what’s crucial to include and what’s unnecessary that you can leave out.
There’s corporate video script templates online with examples of what to put where, so to start download one and work with a layout as you slowly add your key points (click here to get hold of a simple promotional video script template we’ve put together and a rundown of the ABCs of scriptwriting for video).
Your page will quickly fill with words, corresponding to screen time, which can be expensive to produce, so it’s imperative that what you incorporate into your script serves a designated purpose that contributes to achieving your final goal.
Research
While a pretty obvious course of action, it can’t be overstated nor underestimated how important good research is to delivering a great script for your video.
What’s the main aim of the video? What info are you trying to communicate? How much information is too much information? Determining what key data or product information would be good to include in your script really helps – the work you do beforehand will ultimately decide whether or not your script is a success. Obviously you don’t want to stuff your script full of product features or monotonous statistics, but gathering a handful of strong selling points or industry facts can work well in shaping the direction of your video, supporting your case and giving the video credibility. We know this can be a fairly time-consuming step, but if you do it well, it will pay off in the long run.
Scoping
Scope the market and investigate the competition as well as any contemporaries/market leaders in your field. It’s highly unlikely you’ll get given access to read, review, and take notes of your competitors’ actual scripts, but you can watch and evaluate their videos made from said scripts – these videos are often public and can be found on a company’s website or social media channels. Pay close attention to their style (visual and audio), language, music and sounds, length, themes, and key takeaway messages, as well as how they deliver them. Consider what they did well and maybe what they didn’t do well so as to avoid these mistakes when putting your own script together. Consider also the trends of the time––what’s in and what’s out. You don’t want to copy what’s already been done, so scoping what your competitors or contemporaries are doing gives you insight into what the ‘norm’ is. If you’re feeling adventurous, be brave enough to stand out from the crowd and do something completely different and unique with your script.
Reevaluate
A short, simple but crucial step. Once you’ve compiled all your research, investigated the current market, and planned your work down to the finest detail, take a step back and consider with an objective, critiquing eye everything you’ve done up until that point as well as everything you had planned to do moving forward.
Ask yourself: is the project where you want it to be, and is it moving in the direction you want it to go? If not, what needs changing? What can you be doing better so the main message is heard? How do you take your script to the next level? Is there something you’ve left out?
Reevaluate where the script is at. If you believe that you’re on the right track, then it’s time to:
Commit
Commit to the script. Commit to not only start writing it, but finish writing it. That thing isn’t going to complete itself. Writing can be hard– especially if you’re not trained in it–but if you’ve done your research and taken the time to view and understand how scripts are laid out, then you should have no excuses not to dive right in and get writing. Believe in your vision and back yourself.
Sometimes the right word just won’t come– but keep at it. Keep searching for that right word and the next right word and the next right word until you have a sentence, and then repeat the process. One thought after the other until you’ve said what you’ve needed to say in the clearest possible terms. Once you’ve done that, read over your script and edit it and re-edit it again. Fine-tune it until it’s perfect. When you’ve got your script to the point you want it at, you can sit back and feel good about clicking send to your team to get feedback.
So once you have a working script, then what? For further information on developing your plan of attack, click through to see how to devise a video production brief.
Conclusion
So there you have it. A few handy tips to hopefully make the pre-production stage of your script a little easier to understand and more attainable to grasp and put into action.
As well as its natural challenges, writing can also be a lonely and sometimes confusing task. If this proves to be the case, we are always available to provide assistance and guidance throughout the process. Feel free also to check out our YouTube course on writing video scripts, and if you have any further questions or enquiries, please don’t hesitate to drop us a line and we will get back to you as soon as we can. All the best with your writing and filming endeavours.
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