The Secret to Great Video — No Writing Allowed

This will be very upsetting to generations of graduates of journalism schools ...

This will be very upsetting to generations of graduates of journalism schools who took courses entitled Writing For News or something similar.

The standard process of producing video stories, news or otherwise, is to sit down and bang out a written script, then go into an edit and use the script as a roadmap to drive your editing and storytelling.

As it turns out, there is nothing more destructive to making a great video story than having a written script or writing in general.

What in the world am I talking about?

To understand this, let’s first start with an understanding of writing.

Even now, some (unsettling) 60 years after the fact, I can still remember my first ‘reader’ in First Grade, where I learned how to read. Run Jip Run. (Jip was the dog). It was the adventures of Sally, Billy, and Jip the dog.

Reading does not come naturally to children. Show a 5-year-old child a video, and they ‘get it’ immediately. Show them the same story on a printed page, and they struggle to comprehend it, painfully sounding out the letters. That is because reading (and its companion writing) are a kind of coding. We create images to clue us into the words we are trying to replicate. This is true whether we are talking about English or Mandarin, or Arabic. The letters are a kind of code that one must learn to decipher. Reading and writing do not come naturally — they are skills that must be learned.

For more than 5,000 years, we have depended on this coding system to pass along information, tell stories, and even report the ‘news,’ as it was. But it is not a pure language. It is a painful process of taking words and sounds and ideas and coding them into letters to be decoded later by readers. It is bulky and complex. Of course, until about 100 years ago or so, it was the only way to pass on ideas. The telegraph was an electronic way of transmitting those letters — take the letter S for example, and turn it into a series of electronic pulses dot dot dot. Now we have coded and decoded twice.

The advent, first of film and latterly of video, gave us an entirely new tool for communicating experiences, ideas, and concepts and telling stories. Unlike writing, video is pure. It captures images and sounds, allows us to manipulate them, and then to tell stories in that same medium — picture, and sound. It is an incredibly powerful and compelling medium — but an entirely new one.

To take that medium of picture and sound, to then covert it to written words and letters, and then to take those words and letters (the written script) and convert it back again into pictures and sound is not only crazy and a waste of time, but it is also inherently destructive to the medium because in doing so, you lose the emotional power that the pictures and sound communicate. You no longer ‘feel’ what the viewer is going to feel, nor what you felt when you recorded the event. Compared to video, writing is sterile.

So that is why when we run our boot camps, we forbid written scripts. We go directly from image and sound to image and sound. Rather remarkably, editing software allows you to do just that. As you build the story, if you do it right, you (and the viewer) can directly feel the same power and the same emotion that you felt when you recorded it.

It is a bit painful initially, particularly for graduates of the ‘writing for broadcast’ classes, but once people wrap their heads around it, it is remarkably liberating and produces far more powerful pieces.

We are privileged to witness the birth of an entirely new language — one with enormous potential and we have only just begun to scratch the surface.