Scriptwriting

On my last project, I had the opportunity of writing the script for one of the episodes. It was a massive learning curve and I’m super grateful to have had the chance to work on this skill – which is a vital one to develop before taking my next step up the career ladder.

The first thing to think about is the structure of the story as a whole. What are the different components of your story? In what order will you put them? What’s the overarching theme of the story? My tip would be to write out the different components of the story in a way that seem to make sense, then leave it for a bit and think about it. Come back the next day and ask yourself, what is this story really about? What’s the big picture? Then think about if that big picture theme changes anything about how you put together the script.

Once you’ve organised the different parts of the story, you’ll need to come up with links between each section. That could be commentary VO or it could be pieces to camera, depending on if you have a presenter or not. With these, it helps to keep that big picture idea in mind. How do each of these story sections link back to the big idea, and then how do they link to each other? Try to get both ideas into each link, to keep your overall story on track.

Whether you’re writing VO or PTCs or both, it’s important to try and get the voice right. This could be the voice of your presenter, or of your audience. The best way to get that right is to watch other programmes with the same presenter or for the same channel, so you can get the tone, vocabulary range and sentence length right. It’s quite an art!

And finally, once you’ve planned it all out in terms of structure and content, add a splash of imagination! Is there a more creative way you can film that sequence? Is there a cool place you can film that PTC? Is there a nice sequence you can do to illustrate that particular point? Is there something practical you can get your presenter or contributor to do, so that you show rather than tell the story point to your viewer? Get as creative as possible, and then pare back your ambition according to budget constraints…

I hope these tips are helpful for anyone else doing scriptwriting!

Story Arcs

As I’ve gained more experience in both development and production, I’ve learned more and more about how to structure a story, and what makes a good story.

I’ve written in an earlier blog post about story structure, but in this post I want to talk specifically about story arc. This is where you go on a journey during the story, and at the end you’re in a different place to when you began. Some sort of progress needs to have been made during the story, whether that’s moving forward in time, or in terms of an experiment, or just a change for the character.

For example, we could be following the story of a farmer who is trying out a new species of apple tree in his orchard. We find out why he’s trying out this kind of tree, what difference he hopes it will make in his orchard, and what’s so special about the apples it produces. Then there’s a twist: perhaps the tree doesn’t take well to the soil, or the neighbouring farmers disapprove of the new crop, or supermarkets won’t buy it. And finally, the farmer makes some changes to the fertiliser or finds a different supplier to take his new breed of apples, and the story is resolved. The orchard has changed, the farmer has changed, the apples have changed.

This is an example of what I like to call a ‘perfect cadence’ story. Any other readers who did their Grade 5 Music Theory test will (hopefully!) remember that a perfect cadence as a series of chords which resolves the musical line at the end of a phrase. But not all stories have to end in resolution. An ‘imperfect cadence’ story might run as follows:

A farmer is trying a new type of apple tree in his orchard. We find out why he’s trying out this kind of tree, what difference he hopes it will make in his orchard, and what’s so special about the apples it produces. But the tree doesn’t take well to the soil, and in the first season he gets barely any apples – none of them are saleable. He seeks advice from an apple expert, and tries a series of experiments to see if he can get this new apple tree to work in his orchard. The apple expert tells us what these experiments should show, and how the farmer might use the results of the experiments to improve his apple growing capabilities. We leave the farmer to his experiments, having learned about the apples, but without the resolution of whether or not he has been successful.

An imperfect cadence story might not be fully resolved at the end, but it should leave the viewer with some hope for the future. There is still a story arc, because there has been a change: at the start of the story, the farmer was hoping to grow a new kind of apple tree. At the end of the story, the farmer is growing the apple tree, but still has some work to do in order to make it commercially viable.

So if you’re trying to find stories with good story arcs, or trying to shape an existing story, remember to look for a change between the beginning and the end of the story, but don’t get stuck on trying to engineer an appropriate resolution.