A Seven-Step Method for Developing a Creative Concept

4

Knowing how to describe visuals, sound, and action so that a production team can understand your intentions is the essential task of a scriptwriter. However, knowing this does not help you come up with a program idea or construct a script. How scripts get started is often a mystery to the beginner. One thing is certain. You do not just start describing scenes and write a first draft script. That is a recipe for failure. Scriptwriting is preceded by a great deal of thinking. It is probably true to say that writers in the media business are paid to think as much as to write. Once you have done the right thinking, the writing follows as night follows day. We now outline the steps needed to develop a creative concept. A strong creative concept is the foundation of successful scriptwriting.

The visual media of the twenty-first century are sophisticated communications tools. From their roots in photography and film, they continue to evolve in electronic form with dazzling innovations. To succeed in writing for these media, we need to see how the choice of the medium and its application result from a thinking process. It is the quality of this thinking process that determines the quality of the writing and the effectiveness of the communication. This is the meta-writing that we introduced in Chapter 1: writing that is not the finished document, but the writing you do below, or behind, the actual writing. This is the part of the iceberg that is unseen below the surface. If you watch a film or video, or even if you read a script, you do not see all of the analytic and conceptual thinking on which it is based.

Let’s start with an axiom. An axiom is an undisputed given from which argument or investigation can proceed. Our axiom states that every program is a response to a communication problem. If there were no need to show, tell, explain, attract, entertain, seduce, delight, or distract an audience, there would be no reason to make a program and, therefore, no need to write a script. Common sense tells us that any program addresses and solves some kind of communication need. Before we can start any job, we have to identify and define this particular communications need. Going through this analysis is not only essential but highly creative. Moreover, it is a method that will always prepare you for any writing job. As you learn your scriptwriting craft, follow the seven-step process described in this chapter. When you are experienced and a proven producer of scripts, you can adopt your own way of defining a solution to a communications problem.

Step 1: Define the Communication Problem

Most of this method is logic and common sense. The shorthand question to answer is “What need?” Sometimes, you will come across the term “needs analysis,” referring to the investigation that discovers a communication problem. Basic communication means that someone (a person or corporate entity) expresses a thought, idea, or message that is delivered via some kind of medium—speech, print, video, interactive multimedia—to a receiver. The message can be designed and sent but not necessarily received, or if received, not necessarily understood. We all experience unsuccessful communication both as senders and receivers. Talking or writing to your friends, parents, or strangers, although it could be important, is easy to do and doesn’t cost you anything except, perhaps, for a telephone call or a postage stamp. Creating, sending, and receiving a PSA, a corporate PR video, or a training video is a very expensive exercise. Doing it haphazardly or improvising as you go is too risky. Professionals have developed ways of tipping the odds in favor of success by careful analysis and thought about the nature of the communication problem that is the reason for making a program.

Defining the communication need or problem is the first step. Collaboration is needed between the scriptwriter and the producer, or between the writer and a client. Very often you write for others, not for personal expression or for artistic reasons, but to help them communicate successfully. Until you know what the communication problem is, you cannot begin. Until writer and client define it and both agree what it is, the enterprise is fraught with hazard. You risk misunderstanding, multiple revisions, wasted money, and, finally, an unsuccessful result. The seven-step method discussed here is particularly successful for commissioned scriptwriting.

Think of it this way! Unless you can identify an audience that needs to know, understand, or perceive something that you, the communicator, want them to grasp, there is no basis for a script or a program. Simply put, you do not know what to say, to whom, or why you should demand an audience’s attention. Too often, corporate clients decide to make a video or create a web site without thinking through what precise problem it will solve. It is very important to grasp this basic point: that you must think for your client because your client may not have thought through the problem. A client can ask an architect to design a bad building without realizing it. A client can ask a producer to produce a bad video without knowing. Architects can design buildings that do not solve the problem that led to the need for the building, and producers can make videos that do not solve the communications problem.

Let us illustrate this with some examples. First, we will go through the analysis of the communication problem so as to define the media need. Then we will see how to write it down in an acceptable and convincing way. Such a document is an intelligent form of insurance for the writer as well as being a service to the producer or client.

Ivy College: An Admissions Video

Most college students have seen a video made by a college or university to recruit students. There must be hundreds of them. Now there are CD-ROMs and web sites that provide an interactive opportunity for the prospective students to get information. Because you can identify strongly with this particular audience, put yourselves in the recruitment video creator’s shoes and think about the communications problem for the academic institution. What is it? The institution has to think about the needs of the student. What information will satisfy the high school senior’s need for facts about courses, curricula, dorm life, the campus environment, sports, and recreational facilities? Is it just a need for information? Doesn’t the institution want to project itself to a certain kind of student, to differentiate itself from other institutions? Does it want any student at any price? Is there something special about the institution and its traditions? What role should the video play in the whole process of recruitment that involves print media, applications, phone calls, campus visits, and counseling?

How can we define the communications problem? The students who might want to apply to Ivy College don’t know enough about the institution to enable them to make a decision to apply, or perhaps to make an inquiry about applying. They might not know where it is, what it looks like, what the courses are like, what the other students are like, whether it matches a special interest or requirement. They might not know that Ivy College has a strong program in, say, marine biology. They might not know things the college wants them to know, or they might want to know things that the college doesn’t want them to know.

The question then arises, “What is the objective of the video?” After your audience has seen it, what do you want the result to be? Very quickly we find three questions in play that are closely interrelated: (1) What is the nature of the communication problem you want to solve? (2) Who is your audience? and, (3) How can you define the successful outcome of that communication, namely, the objective?

Now that several issues are on the table, you have to be able to state clearly what each one is. This means being able to write them down for someone else to read and evaluate. The beginning scriptwriter is typically impatient and wants to get started on the actual writing, and thus may be tempted to brush off the questions that this chapter addresses. Whatever you do, resist the temptation to shortcut the analytic thinking that precedes writing. At the outset of a scriptwriting job, all is promise, all is possible, and you have a great deal of freedom to invent. With each step, the script becomes more and more concrete, more and more specific, and has to deliver on the easy promises of the concept you put forward at the beginning. These analytic steps ensure that you stay brief and on target.

American Express: American Travel in Europe

American Express has an interest in the success of European hotels and restaurants that accept its card. American Express is sometimes perceived as an agent taking a percentage of revenue rather than as a contributor to the travel and tourism industry. Its market research indicates that the pattern of American tourism is changing and that the European tourist industry is in danger of losing its market share.

What is the communications problem? It is complex. First, there is a need to communicate information. The client knows something the audience doesn’t know. If we tell that audience what we know, they will see a business problem in a different light. They will also change their perception of the client from a passive intermediary to a contributor and a partner. So the second communications problem is to shift perception or attitude. You will be able to measure the success or failure of the speech, publication, or video by the transfer of information and by the change of attitude.

The next issue: who is the audience and what is their current mentality? Unless you can answer these questions, you cannot ever design a successful communication. Even when you answer the question of who the audience is, you still don’t know what the content should be, nor how you will persuade them to see your point of view. If you define your communication problem clearly, at least you can start thinking about the other problems with some hope of success.

In this case, the target audience is European travel professionals such as hotel management staff, restaurateurs, and tourist authorities (but not the general public). Research shows that this audience is somewhat complacent. They think the tourists will keep coming because it is a law of nature, like the migration of elk across the tundra. They are ignorant of American trends and tastes and unaware of competitive destinations. (See complete script on the DVD.)

Let’s look at another communications problem.

PSA for Battered Women

A shelter, also an advisory service for battered women, wants to make a PSA to reach women who need a refuge from abuse. This is a real challenge to think through. You may think it is obvious. Your target audience is battered women. You just tell them about the safe house and where it is. However, there are a dozen different messages that serve different communications needs. Some are purely informational: where is it? what is the phone number? There are women victims who don’t know about it. Your PSA tells them. Communication problem solved! Job done!

But there are also women who are abused who don’t think of their treatment as abuse. They are in denial, as the current psychological language describes it. Some are in real physical danger. Others may be sliding into a pattern that will lead to abuse. Some have children; some don’t. Some are educated; some aren’t. Some are afraid and confused; some are aware of the abuse but powerless to overcome their problems.

Suddenly, we realize that a good PSA for one type of battered woman would be a bad PSA for another. A meaningful message for one would be of no interest to another. The communication problem has to be defined very closely to accomplish a meaningful objective. One problem might be informational; another might be motivational. You have to get your audience to think and go on thinking. Another problem you might want to solve could be defined by behavior—you want your audience to pick up the phone and call the number you publicize in the PSA.

You have almost certainly seen PSAs that address the issues of drugs, smoking, or prejudice. All of them involve quite complex decisions about what communication problem is in play. What is certain is that the problem varies with the target audience. Hence, the objective varies with both. It is like an equation in algebra. If you change the value of one unknown, you get a different answer.

Shell Gas International

An oil company has invented a process that can turn natural gas into lubrication oils at an economical cost. Huge reserves of natural gas exist in both developed and undeveloped countries that are practically worthless because there is no nearby market for the gas. However, there is a market for lubrication products because they have higher value and can be delivered to market at less cost. The decision to buy the process, make the investment, and enter into a joint venture would be made by a handful of people in the world—oil ministers and senior geologists or advisors. The countries involved number about a dozen.

The target audience for this video is going to be about 25 people, 50 at most. Contrast that with the audience for a college recruitment video, or an exercise video that shows you how to get “buns of steel.” How different are the communication problems! How different are the target audiences! How different are the objectives of each video! Until you define the answers to the key questions, you don’t stand a chance of writing a successful script. Your interest may be in writing for entertainment media. Although the problems are slightly different, you still need to be able to answer a variant of the same questions. For instance, you need to know who your primary audience is—children, thirty-somethings, women, or youth. Your objective could be to make them laugh or cry. You might intend to write drama, comedy, or documentary. For television you might be writing a game show or a children’s adventure or an animated cartoon. All of these have different premises and, therefore, demand different thinking.

In summary, defining a communication problem is a “needs” analysis of a communication deficiency of some kind. Somebody or some group needs to know something that they don’t know. Having established what it is, you follow the steps to find a media solution that will tell them what they need to know. Ask yourself why the program should be made. It must solve a communication problem that you must identify clearly. Sometimes, people confuse the communication problem with another larger problem that lies behind the immediate reason for making the program. This could be a social problem or a marketing problem, which is the reason for the need for communication. However, the communication problem is not the social problem. For example, smoking is a public health problem. The objective of public policy is to stop people, especially young people, from getting addicted to nicotine. The communication problem, however, is not to stop people smoking. It is to change attitude or motivate change.

An anti-smoking PSA might address a specific communication problem, which is that teenage smokers are unaware or dismissive of the health hazard of smoking. They’ve heard it all before. They dismiss the warnings and believe they are immortal. Getting through this specific problem of denial is the communication problem. Behind it lies a larger social and public health problem: persuading teenagers to stop smoking, or not to start in the first place. Beginners often and easily confuse the marketing problem or the social problem with the communication problem. Someone who says the communication problem is the need to show that drinking and driving do not go together is stating an objective, not a problem—not stating the problem but the solution.

Take another topic! What is the communication problem that lies behind a college recruitment video? Someone who says, “The communication problem is to show high school students, mostly seniors, how to apply to college through a video,” has not found the problem. The problem is better stated by asking, “What do those who are unsure about the application process to apply to college need to know in order to apply successfully?” Or, “Many high school students are insecure about the college application process and do not know how to go about applying.” That states a problem for which there is a media solution.

You can see that several different PSAs could be made from the same generalized premise in each case. So, to get off on the right foot, it is really important to nail this question accurately. Smoking is a social problem or a health problem; domestic abuse is a social problem; college recruitment is a marketing problem. But within these, there are communication problems that will be specific to the programs, will define your PSA and lead to clear ideas about the target audience and the objective.

Step 2: Define the Target Audience

The shorthand question to answer is, “To whom?” From the previous examples, you can see it is impossible to talk about any communication problem without bumping into the question of who is the target audience. If you change the audience, you change the kind of problem, and hence, the objective. If you want to warn smokers of the dangers of smoking, you will write a completely different script if you are addressing adolescents or high school students compared to adults or veteran smokers. Getting someone to stop a 20-year-old habit is a different communication task than discouraging a young person from starting. Selling a process to turn natural gas into lubrication oils will never have the customer of those oils as its audience. Its audience is decision makers who will give a green light to the investment of hundreds of millions of dollars. If you do not accurately profile your audience, you will endanger your communication.

To illustrate how much the target audience changes the communication problem and the objective, let’s play with the variables. The message is, “I love you.” You have had an argument with your boyfriend or girlfriend. You want to make up. Suddenly, the message takes on a different weight. How you will communicate suddenly becomes very important. Sincerity is crucial. But some kinds of sincerity are better than others. How the message is delivered is critical.

Try another variation. The target audience for your “I love you” message is your mother on Mother’s Day, or your grandmother on her ninetieth birthday. Does that color the problem differently and suggest a completely different objective? Or, your audience is someone to whom you are expressing this feeling for the first time. You have never uttered these words to this person before. Does that feel different? You get the point. Every time you vary the target audience, you change the communication problem and the kind of strategy that is going to make it succeed.

Take the Ivy College recruitment video discussed earlier. What if your target audience is nontraditional or returning students? What if your video is for a graduate program? Consider an extreme case. What if your audience is openly hostile? A company takes over another company and intends to rationalize the operation leading to layoffs, relocation, and changes in job titles. You are not going to construct the same video as if you were addressing company personnel about pensions or safety issues in the workplace. You have to address the deep distrust the audience will bring to the company’s message. In general, awareness of what the audience thinks, feels, knows, understands, does for a living, does for recreation, and so on could change everything. Their educational level, income, gender, age, married status, political views, or consumer preferences could flip your approach one way or the other.

Most beginners tend to be too vague about their target audience. Here’s an example of a student attempt at defining the audience for a college admissions video:

This is too vague and mixes the statement up with objectives about “majors.” In fact, some of the audience might not know they are interested in a small college or in the geographical location. The point is that we want to define who they are. Male and female is clear. They must be high school seniors or graduates. Are they all American, or are there also international students? Income might be a factor for private college tuition. Location is part of the content or the strategy of persuasion rather than a definition of the identity of the audience.

There are two words you need to know about that refer to techniques of measuring and identifying the character of audiences. They are demographics and psychographics. For most scriptwriting, you need to think about both.

Demographics

Trying to identify the common characteristics of a group of people so that you can define them as a target audience is a professional preoccupation of advertisers, public relations practitioners, pollsters, marketers, television ratings researchers, and more. Millions of dollars are spent on audience research and market research to identify the profile of a buyer or a viewer. Just because you don’t have a large budget to commission such research does not mean you can ignore demographics when you try to define who your audience is. You can, and should, do some amateur demographics. A lot of it is common sense.

Let’s put down the major characteristics that delimit the nature of a person and categorize him or her as part of one grouping or another.

Age

Age will affect the vocabulary you can use and the sort of devices that will work. You would not use a stuffed animal or a dinosaur character to explain company pensions, but you might use them to warn young children about the dangers of crossing the road. The college admissions video has a fairly well-defined target age. Many other projects do not have well-defined age targets.

Gender

If you could identify a majority female audience, you might opt for a different approach than if it were a majority male audience. You can see this in TV advertising for products with a gender bias such as shampoos, hygiene products, or perfume. A PSA targeting battered women is easier to write because the gender of the target audience is more likely to be women. However, you could write a PSA targeted at male abusers also, trying to increase awareness of destructive behavior. The approach would have to be entirely different. Yet again, women also abuse men although it is less well known. This would entail a complete rethink of the way to approach the PSA message.

Race and Ethnic Origin

The sociology of race and ethnic origins tells us that groups have identities. There are common cultural assumptions and values that might aid or hinder communicating with these groups. The United States is home to numerous subcultures that might respond differently to certain nuances in language, music or style. A good example is the campaign by the Milk Marketing Board with the well-known tag line, “Got milk?” Translate this into Spanish and you get, “Are you lactating?” If your audience is international, the possibilities for cross-cultural misunderstanding are considerable. The most obvious way this could affect your message design is in casting. You might want the actors in your production to be representative of a minority group. A recent TV recruitment commercial for the U.S. Army showed a young African American youth with his mother. He says that it is time for him to be the man now. Interestingly, this ad implies that we are seeing a stereotyped single parent family presumed to be prevalent in this demographic. Moreover, the ad is clearly pitched at a disadvantaged racial and economic demographic. The target is race.

Wal-Mart has started doing business in Germany. In the United States, people are more familiar with strangers than in Europe. The greeters who approach shoppers at the entrance to Wal-Mart (the smiley face) offended Germans who complained to management about being approached by strangers. American sales personnel and telephone marketers call you by your first name, which Europeans consider a breach of etiquette that is offensive. There are regional differences in the United States. This is often exploited in advertising food that is regional, for instance. A southern accent might sell the barbecued spare ribs or the sauce better than a Boston accent which might give the New England clam chowder an identity.

Education

The educational level of an audience governs the vocabulary you can use, the general knowledge you can assume, and the kind of argument that will be readily understood. When writing a corporate video for Shell that is aimed at decision makers in petroleum-producing countries, you can assume a certain level of language and concept, but you have to know the difference between an audience of geologists and an audience of ministers or high-level civil servants who are not scientists. The larger the audience, the lower the educational denominator is likely to be until you reach a national average.

A pharmaceutical company making a video about a new cholesterol-lowering drug aimed at cardiologists has a very high educational demographic. If the video is aimed, however, at the eventual users of that same cholesterol-lowering drug, the demographics change. The patients who are likely to use the drug cuts across the educational demographic.

Income

Socioeconomic classes have been studied intensively by advertisers so that they can define their characteristics. You may have heard of the letter classifications that designate income, with “A” being those people with the highest disposable income. Income is usually associated with professional occupations. Wealth might correlate with a political bias toward conservative views.

In the final analysis, most audiences are defined by complex variables. Whatever you can do to narrow down the classification of your audience’s cultural preferences, disposable income, or cultural attitudes will help.

Psychographics

A concern with psychographics means worrying about what is going through the mind of your target audience. So just as you can classify the social and cultural characteristics of a person, you can also identify attitudes and mental outlook or state of mind. A person’s attitude might overwhelm the demographics for certain messages. Most people are driven by emotions to a greater or lesser degree. How they feel governs how they act and how they respond. Visual media such as film, video, and television communicate emotionally. For one reason, they show the human face and figure with all the body language and nonverbal communication that people intuitively understand. They tell stories that invite emotional responses. They use visual images that signify emotions or engender strong emotional responses. An image of an explosion or a plane crash provokes awe, fear, and fascination. Think of an archive shot of a hydrogen bomb going off with its signature mushroom cloud, or the dark vortex of a tornado touching down. These images compel attention.

Think about the ways that audiences can be “turned off.” The very phrase is a metaphor. A knob or a button on a radio or television set or remote control gives the user the power to interrupt the transmission or switch to another channel. Even if you were strapped to a chair and left in front of a television with your eyelids taped open, your attention could wander or even switch off entirely. We all have a “turn off” function in the brain, and we have filters that screen out what we don’t want to hear.

Corporate television and video often play to captive audiences. Unless the program designers give thought to the psychographics, they will lose the audience because of the “turn-off” switch in their brains. A client once argued to me that his internal corporate audience of middle managers was paid to watch the program we were making and rejected my imaginative ideas to motivate them. This person did not understand psychographics. Audience response involves passive assent at a minimum. A stronger posture would be neutral consent. Even more positive would be getting the audience to actively seek and participate in the experience of the program in a way that involves a level of enjoyment.

Students sometimes tell me that a certain subject is boring to write about. My reply is always that there are no boring subjects, only boring writers. As a scriptwriter, I believe, and you must believe, that there is always a way to reach an audience.

Safety is a huge problem that costs corporate America millions of dollars. Companies are strongly motivated to reduce insurance premiums and lost work days by communicating safe work practices. This subject probably sounds pretty boring to you, but if you are good, you can find a way to make the topic watchable. The point is not whether you would choose to view a safety video on how to use ladders at home on a Saturday night and invite your friends. Nevertheless, in the right context, at the right moment, many outwardly uninteresting subjects become relevant to what you need to know in your job, or in your life.

Video Arts is a company that has made millions out of videos on management training often written around a comic character played by John Cleese, the Monty Python actor. The videos are often funny and clever. The audience swallows the message with the comedy and remembers it. Delivered as a straight message, the audience might reject that which it willingly accepts when presented with humor. This is applied psychographics.

Emotions are complex, volatile, and difficult to categorize. For these reasons, psychographics is an art rather than a science. You don’t have to be a psychologist or psychic to make use of psychographics in your writing. Once again, a great deal is common sense deduction. You can analyze your audience’s psychographics by putting yourself in its shoes. You can investigate your own feelings and attitudes to extrapolate what is likely to be shared by another. You have to be self-aware and self-analytical. Your own strong preferences might not represent the masses. Your taste in music, whether it’s Mozart or Motley Crüe, Handel or Heavy Metal, seems right to your ear, but it may turn off a large segment of your audience.

This, incidentally, makes it very difficult to choose music for a sound track. Surprising successes can result from daring choices. 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrik’s classic film, made a huge audience listen to and appreciate a modern classical composer, Ricard Strauss. This mass audience probably didn’t know the name of the composer or the name of the composition, Thus Spake Zarathustra, or that it was played by the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Herbert Von Karajan, but they responded to the music. Now most people instantly recognize the theme. The theme was imitated and copied and jazzed up and played on different instruments. It was hummed by millions. Another example was the huge jump in sales of a Mozart piano concerto (No. 21, C major, K. 467) whose slow movement was used in the sound track of a Danish film, Elvira Madigan. People who would normally never listen to or buy a recording of Mozart were sending this record off the charts because the director made them experience the lyrical and romantic feeling of the music. All this is to remind you that you have to use intuition. Sometimes you have to go beyond the obvious, the conventional, and the predictable to tap into the receptivity of an audience.

What are the main psychological issues that make up a person’s mind? They are things you know about already.

Emotion

We all have moods and sensations that are colored by emotions that range from down or depressed, sad and anxious to happy, elated, playful and wild. Individuals have emotions; groups have emotions; and crowds react with emotions. Most rock concerts are exercises in crowd mood creation. Emotions are tricky and volatile, especially when crowds are involved. An audience is sometimes a crowd and sometimes a large number of individuals in a serial response to a program. Think of a book that has sold a million copies. The audience is large, but each one of that million encountered the book individually. They do not all gather in a stadium for a mass reading, whereas the audience for a movie made from the book is a different entity. Groups of hundreds of people sit together and experience the same moments together, perhaps laugh together or cry together. Even a television audience is a simultaneous mass audience of single viewers or small groups of viewers.

As a scriptwriter you have to deal with emotions, with the anticipated emotional response of your audience. It is almost always important to communicate emotionally to an audience in the visual media as well as by reason and logic. The mixture varies with the nature of the communication. Dramatic narrative tends to work through emotional communication, whereas documentary or training videos lean on logical argument. Getting battered women to use a shelter probably requires reaching the audience through emotion rather than reason. The selling of Shell’s natural gas conversion process, in contrast, should be based primarily on logic and rational exposition.

Attitude

An audience frequently has an attitude, not in the slang sense of the word, which corrupts the original meaning, but in the sense that their disposition can be characterized by it. Think of these different audiences.

After the Rodney King beating by four Los Angeles police officers, you have to write a police PR video about police and community relations in the inner city. Simply put, your audience is going to be hostile. You cannot make a move without dealing with the open distrust and skepticism that will block their hearing what you want to convey.

You have to write an internal PR script for a company that has taken over another company, to explain the benefits of the merger to the employees. People are fearful of losing their jobs, their seniority, or their pensions. You cannot proceed without taking into account the attitude of this audience.

The opposite condition can arise. Audiences can be receptive as well as hostile. You are writing a recruiting video for an elite volunteer military unit such as the Marine Corps or the Green Berets. You are probably preaching to the converted. If they are watching, it’s because they are already thinking about joining up. You don’t have to break down mistrust, skepticism, or hostility. You do not design the message to turn pacifists into warriors.

Yet other audiences are neutral or indifferent. They do not bring strong negative or strong positive predisposition to the table. You have to wake them up or arouse interest or curiosity by your images and your creative ideas. It seems constructive for a scriptwriter to think carefully about whether his audience falls into one or other of these categories—receptive, hostile, or indifferent.

Attention Span

How long does it take you to change the TV channel if something doesn’t catch your interest? You’ve been pampered all your life by a multitude of choices. You are merciless. If you don’t like something, you change it. You switch to another channel, or you switch off the TV. Now you are on the other side of the game. You have to hold your audience by the pacing, content, and imagination of your script. They have the remote control. Andy Warhol, the controversial American artist, made an 8-hour film of one of his favorite stars sleeping. Needless to say, it did not have a large box office. It was a rebellious stunt by an outrageous artist.

Think about how network news programs try to keep you interested with little previews and announcements about what’s up next. They use good-looking anchors who smile at you through the lens and seduce you into staying with them. How many times do you hear the line, “Don’t go away?”

Information Overload

In our day and age, the amount of information presented to us through print media, radio, TV, and now the Internet is overwhelming—and that is before you consider deeper levels of information that you can search out in books, libraries, or archives or on the internet. We all have to limit our intake in order to process it. Thinking about the rate at which an audience can absorb information is important.

You will hear the terms target audience and primary audience, secondary, even tertiary audience. What do they mean? Even with the exhaustive research that advertisers do to market products, a certain averaging of characteristics is necessary. Dominant factors have to govern your approach. We all quote Lincoln’s phrase about not being able to please all of the people, all of the time. You can, however, please some of the people some of the time. How many can be included is the writer’s challenge. You make your judgment and hope that you bracket the largest and most important part of your audience. The others are called the secondary audience. You want them, but you are not going to jeopardize gaining the larger audience to get them. You know that you might lose some of the secondary audience, but the success of your communication does not depend on them.

The best way to test yourself is to ask whether you can describe that audience profile. Can you say who is not part of that audience? Can you carry your defined audience through the program? Can you connect it to the communication problem? You are now answering the question “to whom?” So now you’ve got a shorthand guide—what for? And to whom? Next we need to answer the question “why?” Answering “why?” means you can define the objective for the video or program.

Step 3: Define the Objective

The communication objective is closely associated with the communication problem. One states the problem; the other states the outcome. So if teenagers do not appreciate or understand the health hazards of smoking, which is the problem, the objective is to change their perception of smoking. The shorthand questions to answer are “why?” and “what for?” In military terms, an objective would be to capture a position or to win the battle. The larger objective is always to win the war. The objective is usually pretty easy to see. The hard part is knowing how to do it. The same is true of scriptwriting. In business terms, an objective would be to achieve a 10 percent increase in sales or a 5 percent decrease in costs. These objectives are clear. The hard part is how to achieve them. Likewise with scriptwriting!

A TV program, film, or video must have an objective that is clear. It is the net result that you are working to achieve at the end of the viewing—the message. It is what the audience is left with as a general effect. A lot of programs are meant to entertain. That is too general. Entertainment can mean many things. Comedy is designed to make the audience laugh; drama, to make the audience worry; romance, to make the audience fantasize; horror, to make the audience fearful, and so on.

Many programs do not have an entertainment objective. The primary objective could be to impart information. That is not to say they are not watchable or entertaining. Lots of programs try to give you facts and figures about a product, about a country, about a health issue, about the history of the country, about the environment, or about the life of an animal species. You assimilate information from the program that you did not possess before watching the program. You may have had other experiences during the program, but taken as a whole, your main acquisition is that you know something or understand something you didn’t know or understand before. The objective was to convey information. What is the primary objective of your script concept? Information objectives appeal to the mind and to the reasoning side of the brain.

Another common way to design a visual communication is to think about shifting the audience’s attitude or point of view. Information might also be part of the package, but the primary net result you desire is to get the audience to see things differently. For example, you can communicate a mountain of facts about the dangers of smoking—how many people die of smoking-related diseases, a list of the negative consequences of smoking. A thinking person might draw conclusions. Almost anyone can draw the conclusion that smoking involves a serious risk to health. Nevertheless, many such people will dismiss the communication and not change their thinking, let alone their behavior.

So facts and information alone won’t work. We have to get the audience to acknowledge the facts and infer consequences for the individual’s health. A nicotine addict has already been bombarded with facts. So try another approach! Make use of drama and imagination to get the audience watching! Let the audience draw its own conclusion. To recall our anti-smoking PSA from the previous chapter, the point of its approach was to turn facts and figures into graphic images that will disturb the audience.

How would you respond to such a PSA? Not with your head! The images bring your emotions into play. You are forced to see something commonplace in a smoker’s daily life in a different context. If you are a smoker, you might be disturbed. You might start seeing your habit differently. Your attitude could shift. If the shift is strong enough, it could be described as motivating. Remember! The word “motivate” comes from the Latin root meaning “to move,” and so does the word “emotion.” If emotions are affected in a coherent and sequenced fashion, the result is motivation.

Most advertising depends on visual stimulation of the emotions to shift attitudes. This is sometimes known as the soft sell. The challenge is to create a sequence of images that compel the viewers to lead themselves to a position from which they cannot go back.

Apply this to more complex problems. You have to make a 15-minute video that communicates safe handling of materials in an industry or explains how to drive defensively. Or you have to make a 10-minute video that persuades the audience to recycle. In this communication problem, your objective is slightly different. The difference is that you not only want to motivate the audience, you also want to activate them. You want them to do something—to put their bottles and cans and plastics into receptacles for collection. This is the most demanding objective because you want to change their behavior. A lot of marketing videos (not TV commercials, as you will see in a later chapter) try to do just that. We have now defined an action objective, commonly called a behavioral objective.

Let’s revisit our examples. The objective is to make high school teenagers think twice about getting addicted to nicotine. The objective is to make battered women seek counseling before they end up in a hospital with broken bones. The objective is to get European travel professionals to think about their tourist product for American tourists and whether it corresponds to what those customers are looking for. The objective is to get a high school graduate or senior to call admissions and ask for an application. And when you revisit the objective of a personal communication (the “I love you” message), the objective is to get your estranged girlfriend to let bygones be bygones and come back to you.

In every case, you can make a definite and specific statement about the successful outcome of the communication. Until you can do that, you will never write a successful script to solve the communication problem because you haven’t thought about what you are trying to achieve.

We now have three clear steps down on paper. One defines the problem, another defines the audience, and the third defines the desired result or objective we are working toward. Answering these three questions does not finish the job because we haven’t answered the question “how?” How are we going to solve the communications problem, reach the audience, and achieve the objective?

Step 4: Define the Strategy

The shorthand question to answer is, “how?” To write a successful script that solves the communication problem, we need to figure out how to achieve the objective, reach the target audience, and suggest the content that leads to effective communication. This is a moment of creative challenge. If you want an audience to think, feel, or act in a certain way, you have to have a strategy. The military commander plans to pound the enemy position with artillery, then divide his forces into two groups who will attack from different directions. A marketing executive has a plan to increase sales by offering an incentive such as a 2-for-1 sale or a free baseball glove with every full tank of gas. This is the “how.” How are you going to achieve your objective?

You can’t give frequent flyer miles to your audience for watching. So how can scriptwriters get the job done? They think up strategic ways to hold the attention of the audience while they deliver the message. For example, they use humor, a story, suspense, shock, intrigue, unique footage, a testimonial, or a case history. Everyone will listen to a joke. If the joke has a clever point, your audience will get the message while they laugh or chuckle.

Many ads use humor. A recent ad shows a dog and a man sitting in front of one another. The dog is training the man to balance a piece of cheese on his nose and on command flip it in the air and eat it. Reversing the roles of dog and man and having the dog talk captures people’s attention with a smile. You will remember that brand of dog food.

Step 5: Define the Content

The shorthand version of defining the content is to ask the question, “what?” What are we going to see and hear on the screen? What is the program going to be about? What happens in the story or narrative of the program? Clearly, the content cannot be defined first. You may well argue that you can define the communications problem, the target audience, and the objective in almost any order. However, they must all be defined before you can designate content. In fact, you really need to have some kind of strategy or creative device to make it all work before you fill in content.

Content is what you see. Content is what your program is about. It is the objective matter or substance of the piece. When a program is shot, the camera has to be placed in front of something to capture its image. The script has to describe what is going to be in front of the camera. How it serves the communication objective may not be apparent from shot to shot.

We can illustrate this by revisiting the several script ideas we have discussed throughout this chapter. In the college recruitment video, the content could be described by a list of the things we are going to shoot: classrooms and teachers, dorm life with students, sports and extracurricular activities. From this list, you can quickly see that content does not often define what is unique about a program. This list could cover hundreds of recruitment videos, if not all of them. What makes one different is the strategy and the creative concept. In the natural gas video, we have to show the process. In this case, we could shoot a pilot plant and show the process working. In the American Express video, the content is testimonials and shots of the type of tourist setting that market research shows appeals to American tourists.

Step 6: Define the Appropriate Medium

The shorthand question to answer is, “which medium?” All media have particular qualities and peculiarities that give them strengths and weakness. What works for film on a large screen projected in a darkened room might not work on a 21-inch TV screen. The intimacy of the television image would not work on a 40-foot movie screen. Dense information that should be presented in the form of graphs works in a slide show but not on video. In short, the concept we devise has to work for the medium, or we have to pick the medium that will work for the concept. We have to write so as to exploit the special advantages and qualities of the medium.

Interviews work well on television and video. Action and long shots work better in film. Corporate clients frequently ask for communication objectives to be put into a video that clash with the medium. For instance, a detailed instruction about how to install a piece of equipment is better done in print. An audience is not able to take in written instructions on a TV screen. They won’t remember them. In print, you can look at the page as long as you need to and refer back to it. If the communication has a long shelf life, an interactive CD-ROM would work better than linear video programming and possibly better than print. A small TV screen won’t work at an exhibition or a trade show. You need something that commands attention visually. A video wall of 9 or 12 programmable TV screens does the job.

What makes a PSA for television different from a PSA for radio, for instance? A student wrote a PSA on domestic abuse that, although conceived for video, works successfully as a pure audio script. It is only secondarily a visual script. The creative idea is a sequence of spoken statements that compels an audience to think. The message is carried in the spoken voice-over more than in the images. Although it also works with visuals, the test is to take the images away and see if it works. A visual concept and visual writing relies on a sequence of visual images:

Although the images have been visualized, you can hear this script. It relies heavily on the spoken commentary. You can easily imagine this as a successful radio commercial. We discussed visual narrative in Chapter 1. Visual ideas work best in a visual medium.

Step 7: Create the Concept

This is the seventh step. You are thinking: “That’s enough. Let’s get started. I’ve done my homework.” Not yet! Before you take the seventh and final step, you should answer these questions in writing so that they are crystal clear. You may get impatient with this method and resist going through this analytic prewriting process. Rest assured that any problem that shows up in your script concept will be traceable to these issues. The most important realization that you can have at this point is that addressing these six issues will enable you to generate creative ideas. Now the hidden process of writing comes out into the light. The meta-writing begins, writing which will dissolve into the final production document.

Before we go to the final step, let’s review the sequence of analytic thinking. The order of analysis is ideally:

  Define the communications problem (What need?)

  Define the target audience (Who?)

  Define the objective (Why?)

  Define the strategy (How?)

  Define the content (What?)

  Define the medium (Which medium?)

The seventh step is the seed of your script. Let’s call it the creative concept or, if you want, just the concept. This is the first visible step of the scriptwriting process. In a professional assignment, you may not write out all of the thinking you did to answer the six questions although it is common practice to write out some response to a client’s communication problem. I like to set down my thinking for all scriptwriting assignments that are not entertainment. So now you are going to explain in writing to your client, producer, or director what the key idea is, what the approach is, how you will use the specific medium to make the communication work. This creative idea will solve the communications problem, reach the target audience, achieve the objective, embody the strategy, provide the content of the program, and show how it will work in the chosen medium.

To some extent, almost anyone can go through the six steps and get to reasonable definitions of each. The seventh step—devising a creative concept or device that will translate all those needs into a working script—is different. It is a creative task, not an analytic task. It is the work of a scriptwriter’s imagination. This is the source of freshness, originality, clarity, and visual intelligence that makes a program compelling to watch or a pleasure to watch. It is hard to explain and perhaps harder still to teach. This is the imaginative talent that you get paid for.

From this concept your script will grow or die. Until you have a convincing concept or proposal that addresses all of the issues expounded in this chapter, you shouldn’t continue. No professional would. You might pull it off for one assignment because the topic is congenial to you. Don’t let yourself do this. You will be digging the grave of your scriptwriting career. Succeeding in this business is about consistent results, producing again and again whether you are inspired or not. It is about becoming a pro. Confidence comes with practice and experience.

We have kept up a running discussion of several communication problems. Now we can float some creative concepts for them. Just in case you are unsure of what creative concept means, let’s clarify. Everything we’ve discussed so far—the “need,” the “who,” the “why,” the “how,” and the “what content” issues—still doesn’t give us images or actions to describe from scene to scene or a way of approaching the topic. The trick is to come up with some creative ideas that will encapsulate all of the definitions for a particular medium. One of these ideas will translate into a living, breathing visual idea that will make a script.

Some ideas sound great but don’t work out in practice, so you have to test them. If you are writing a college recruitment video, how are you going to avoid the predictable shots of campus buildings with voice-over superlatives extolling the praises of the place? You’re creative. You wake up one morning with a brainstorm. You’ll do the college recruitment as a Broadway musical. You can see it now—a chorus of coeds singing and dancing instead of a boring voice-over. It’s entertainment. The audience will keep watching. It’s creative, but somehow it’s not right. The idiom doesn’t suit the target audience. Ignore the fact that it will quadruple the production costs. The problem is that the creative concept runs away with the communication objective. It doesn’t serve it. You lie in bed wondering how you’re going to crack this one. Suddenly, you jump up, hit the word processor and type out your idea. Use your own experience to show the audience what a typical day is like, perhaps with a bit of embellishment to work in all the points you want to make. So this will be—a day in the life of an Ivy College student. That gives you a concept that provides the content, the structure, and the objective. It will give the target audience a character to identify with. Any leftover points could be carried by a commentary voice-over.

Most beginners make the mistake of thinking their first idea is the only idea and the one to work with. You should put down at least three different creative concepts for the job, test them out, and then pick the best. So we still have one to go. What would be another way to get at this objective? How about a student who comes on campus and, through a series of interviews, which we carefully craft to reveal the information we know to be necessary, finds out everything about Ivy College?

How do you choose between them? One way is by pitching them to a client, or the class, or your instructor. Another is by your feel for how well the concept will play out through the detail of the content. There are usually trade-offs. Interviews may be good, but scripting them makes them sound stilted and false. On the other hand, how do you know that you’ll get what you want if you film unscripted interviews? There’s a risk. If you define the six questions with integrity and try out creative concepts, you will isolate a creative concept that works.

The communication problem for American Express was to convey the fruits of its market research to its target audience so that audience would shift their erroneous perception of American tourists in Europe. The research defined categories of travelers such as Grey Panthers, Business Travelers, and Adventurers. They all had different ideas about what they wanted to find in Europe. It was apparent to the writer that the audience of European tourist professionals was complacent and needed to be persuaded by undeniable evidence to change their point of view. In this case, interviewing dozens of each category in unscripted video recordings at an airport yielded enough evidence to corroborate the published market research. It was expensive and a risk, but it paid off. That’s the nature of a creative business. It involves risk. That’s part of what makes it exciting to be a scriptwriter—to have an idea and see it working in a finished program.

We also mentioned the oil company with the process to convert natural gas to lubrication oils. A hundred million dollars had been spent over 10 years in research. A pilot plant had been built to prove it worked. Here the problem was to get scientific and technical information into a form that would be comprehensible and convincing to the small audience of decision makers. The creative concept that worked was governed by the fact that there was a lot of archive footage that had to be used. The solution was to tell a story—a news story. So the script was built around a current affairs format with an actor playing an investigative reporter talking to the camera and taking the audience through the story. It enabled the stock footage to be bracketed with an explanation. It made the patented process sound like a suspense story. It gave a structure and a variety to quite difficult material.

How about a creative concept for a Valentine’s Day message? This is to get your imagination going. Don’t send a card. It’s predictable and conventional. You telephone your girlfriend. You say, “Look out the window up at the sky!” A microlite is flying around trailing a banner that reads, “I love you, Mary Jane. Will you marry me?” Outside your budget? Go to the exercises and try out some of your ideas.

To finish, let us bring it all together and write a document that sets all these issues down. Sometimes, you need to do this for a client as a first step. Sometimes you need to do this for yourself to prepare for your concept. There is no fixed format or industry-wide convention for doing this. A simple solution is to use the headings we have used in this chapter.

A Concept for an Anti-Smoking PSA

The Problem

The problem facing all anti-smoking PSAs is that we are trying to convince addicts to quit. We need to get past their defenses and their denial. All the facts about health hazards are already out there. We have to make them real and emotionally affecting. In Massachusetts, there are a number of effective anti-smoking campaigns. One has a billboard the exact size of a room with the dimensions shown and a punch line: “Second-hand smoke spreads like cancer.” The image and the punch line conspire to make you think. The smoke that fills a room when anyone smokes in it obliges everyone else to smoke. So the spreading smoke is also spreading cancer. Another referred to the number of toxic substances in a cigarette with a tag line saying that it would be illegal to dispose of them in a garbage dump. Another has a simple statistic: “Last year smoking killed 470,000 people.” A recent television campaign against smoking breaks down this number into how many people die each day. The creative visual shows crews piling that number of body bags in a city street. By making the audience see the number as a heap of body bags in a street, the creators make the audience think. You get the idea.

The Target Audience

Our target audience is primarily young adults and teenagers with a secondary audience of older smokers. The young think they are immune to the hazards. The audience will not accept a lecture and is not really impressed by statistics. They are responsive to images of their own lives. We have to show them in a scene that matches a plausible lifestyle for them.

The Objective

The objective is to shift the attitude of the target audience and make them start thinking and start worrying. It is to haunt them with troubling images that won’t go away.

The Strategy

The strategy is to create a little sexy vignette with romance and style that does not reveal itself as an anti-smoking PSA until it is too late for the audience to disengage. They respond to it piecemeal until they are stuck with the conclusion. The logic must be visual, not verbal. We use powerful special effects derived from contemporary fantasy horror films (such as morphing) to reveal a sequence of aging, sickness, and death due to smoking-related disease. The reality is like a bad trip or a hallucination.

The Content

An attractive young man and young woman are in the kitchen after a date sharing a beer and a cigarette.

The Medium

The medium necessary to convey this message is television. It is primarily a visual message and needs close-ups and special effects that are easy to do with video.

The Concept

Interior kitchen, a good looking young man has lit up a cigarette with his girlfriend. He offers her a beer. He goes to the fridge and opens the door. Inside the fridge is a morgue. A white-coated assistant pulls out a draw from the freezer. Our character is visibly shaken, dismisses it, twists the cap off a beer for himself, hands her a beer. Grins. Starts to make seductive small talk. We see her inhale and as the camera pulls back, a special effect reveals the inside of her lungs like an X-ray. Cut to his worried look. Zoom in. Zoom out to the same woman morphing into a much older woman with wrinkles brought on by smoking with emphysema, in a hospital bed, on oxygen. Cut to the kitchen where the couple clink beer bottles. His line: “Your health.” Cut to a cemetery. Close-up of inscription: Died from smoking-related disease. Cut to another headstone. Died from smoking-related disease. And another in more rapid succession. Cut to the kitchen. She puts out her cigarette and coughs once. Super text: “Smoking kills 470,000 Americans every year!”

Now it’s your turn.

Conclusion

At this point, you know the essential scriptwriting problems. You know the stages of script development. Lastly, you have seen how important it is to think before you write. Thinking through the communication problem with this seven-step method will enable you to generate content. This capacity to break down a problem and come up with creative solutions is part of the job of scriptwriter, especially in the corporate world.

Exercises

1. You are going to send a Valentine’s Day message. You will not use the words “I love you.” Using the seven-step method, come up with five creative concepts for five different audiences. Let the changing target audience modify your objective and your strategy. The message does not have to be sent as a video. The question of which medium to use is important. For example, a dozen red roses with a card could be your creative concept. Unchain your imagination.

2. Your job is to devise a creative concept for an anti-smoking PSA using the seven-step method. Come up with five creative concepts for these different target audiences: pregnant women, preteens, college students, and adult addicts.

3. Your assignment is to devise a creative concept for a safety video about (a) carbon monoxide hazards in the home, (b) how to use a ladder, or (c) pedestrian rules for children under age 7.

4. Your assignment is to devise a creative concept to launch a new product to a company sales force: a new car, a new can opener, or a holiday package. Could this be a web site?

5. Your assignment is to write a concept for a video to get people to recycle. How do you define the target audience?