SCRIPT WRITING PROCESS
When coming up with an idea for the documentary, I wanted my documentary to use a poem throughout that would keep the audience interested in the video. I first researched the average words spoken by a person to accumulate to five minutes, the approximate person speaking from 110- 150 words per minute. This meant that I needed 650 words minimum to create a documentary that was long enough for the assignment brief. I started by coming up with the overall topic that I wanted to speak about, coming up with an idea to talk about perception knowing that I could go into sub topics underneath the overall topic. Some of the topics that I wrote down was stereotypes, racism and gender along with a few more topics, myself breaking them down and writing down what I wanted to speak about under each topic.
With knowing the topics that I wanted to discuss and what points I wanted to bring up I started writing the first few sentences, trying to perfect it to be understandable and impactful to the audience. Alongside writing the script I was also researching about perception and trying to understand the topic to the best quality possible. As shown on the picture I did many re-writes of the script by hand, trying to figure out how it should sound and be presented to the audience, wanting the poem to be easy to understand but also metaphoric so the audience could perceive the video in a different way to someone else, learning something about the topic that they didn't know before and taking away something different to everyone else about the overall topic, making it a challenge to write a detailed script that would get an overall point to anyone that watched my documentary meaning it had to be well planned out.
Whilst writing this documentary and researching perception I came across a Albert Einstein quote that I used as inspiration for my script and documentary as it covered the overall lesson I wanted to get through to the audience from my video, the quote being 'Perception is merely an illusion; albeit a very persistent one.' With this quote as my main inspiration I knew that I wanted to teach this lesson to the audience and to show the quote at the end of the video if anyone in the audience didn't understand the lesson from my poem. I continued writing my documentary script, re-writing many sections before writing it up digitally on a computer, making sure that all the points I wanted to get across were clear enough to the audience. I also did many reads of the script myself, making sure it flowed well and rhymed in places but to also time how long it would take to read. I experimented with the times by reading the script, reaching 4 minutes when read by myself as I speak faster than the average human, meaning that with different people voicing over the script on the video that it would stretch to five minutes at the minimum.
With writing the script I knew that I wanted different people to read the script, knowing that the words had to be easy to pronounce by anyone that was reading the script. The decision of multiple voices was an important decision and one I made because my topic is about perception so when the audience hears different voices, they will be perceiving what who the voice may belong to and what they look like, the audience not realising what they are doing until further into the video. I had to keep this in mind whilst writing the script to make sure that I got all of my points across to the audience in an effective manner and to express this decision to the audience clearly. I knew how I wanted the voice actors to present themselves to the audience, my voice actors doing a perfect job at what I wanted to convey. I gave them the script and allowed them to pick a topic, all of them going to the part of the script that they found most interesting which shows more about their personality and that they were interested in that sub-topic overall. My voice actors were Alice Deverill, Harry MoorCroft, Goncalo Santos Ganga, Sarah Cooke, Helen Sloper and Frank Sloper, as well as myself. All of the people that voice acted had different styles of voices, some being older and some being of a different race, getting my point across through my script as how they presented themselves were different to everyone else's in the video.
Overall I learnt a lot more about script writing throughout this process, realising how difficult it can be to make a script that reaches the time mark and thoroughly gets your points across to the audience without rambling on about the same topic. With knowing more about script writing, I will be able to apply the knowledge I have gained throughout this process and apply it to future projects, knowing how to make a detailed script for the audience to understand. I also learnt that writing a metaphorical poem is a challenge to make sure that it is still understandable by all of those that watch the video, meaning the choice of my words had to be sophisticated but understandable by my target audience of 16 to 20 year olds.
References
Anon, (2017). [online] Available at: https://www.quora.com/Speeches-For-the-average-person-speaking-at-a-normal-pace-what-is-the-typical-number-of-words-they-can-say-in-one-minute [Accessed 7 Nov. 2017].
