Video Scriptwriting: Show or Tell?

Is it always better to show than tell in a video script? Ideally, yes. Although video is a combination of sight and sound, your viewer's dominant sense is usually vision. And you want to emphasize it to make the strongest impact.

Unfortunately, reality often erases ideals. Time, budget and resources play an important role in video production. And what you wrote in your video script may not always be achievable for the final product.

Here are three possible situations when telling might steal the spotlight from showing.

1. Abstract information - You need to cover information that is difficult to show visually.

2. Visual content is unavailable – For a variety of reasons, you might not have video content to support the narration.

3. Lack of time – You have more visual content than time available in the video. Instead, you could combine script sections you were planning to show visually and explain it with narration.

For example, I wrote a script on a lawn mower attachment, but we didn't have the budget to create graphics for the technical specifications section, so the information was included in the narration for the raised motor block in video scene 13 ...

Here's some tips on creating effective narration:

1) Make it easy for your narrator. Write out numbers in your video script, so
1, 250 would become: one thousand two hundred and fifty. Choose Anglo over French/Latin based English words. Vary sentence length so narration doesn't sound choppy or monotonous. (Reading aloud your script before submitting a draft is always a good idea.)

2) Avoid explaining the obvious - You don't need to narrate verbatim what's happening on the screen. Use narration to expand on important information that is related to the visual content. You want the audio content of the script to complement the video rather than duplicating it aurally.

3) Hire a professional announcer - Nothing kills rapport with your viewers faster than narration read by a non-professional broadcaster. Amateurs almost always sound monotonous and their pacing is terrible. It's more time consuming using non-pros, and this could impact your bottom line.