I don’t hate video scripts when I’m working with people who have experience with video scripts.
But in software companies, that’s rarely the case.
Which means that people writing and reviewing scripts often don’t understand (a) what normal people sound like when they say things out loud and (b) how dialog and visuals work together to tell a story.
As a result you get scripts that are collapsing under the weight of their abstract and practically meaningless words and sentences. And a final video in which the dialog and visuals have all but the loosest relationship to one another.
In other words: bad videos.
There are two ways to solve this.
Give the job of writing and directing to someone who understands both how to make a good video and how to explain your product.
Don’t script it. Instead, film the best live demo-er at your company and edit down the talk track from their performance.
This video took approach number two.
Damon (the presenter) knows the product and how to talk about it. We just gave him the top three features/differentiators and let him cook.
We did three or four takes. It took 30 mins. Then the editing process took about a day (thanks to collaborative script editing in Descript).
And the result? Pretty darn good, if I may say so myself.
