How I Write Scripts for my YouTube Videos

this episode is sponsored by Squarespace whether you need a domain website or online store make your next move with Squarespace [Music] I script every video I put out and that doesn't mean that I use the script when I film or I'm worried about the individual words but scripting it does help me to prepare what I'm gonna say before I turn the cameras on and that's how I like to make a film and if that's you as well I probably have some good tips to offer you it's probably important to say before you get excited about the tips I'm gonna give you that you don't necessarily have to go this route in fact if you look at YouTube as a whole it's true that vlogging style videos seem to do a lot better and people follow along a lot more and it also means you can put out a lot more videos so seriously think about what sort of videos you want to make I had a few specific reasons about why I didn't want to go that kind of reactive vlogging style video the first is that I don't think I'm very good at just turning the camera on and talking some people are brilliant at that they really can and I've watched them do it just turn the camera on and talk to camera really freely and easily and just have sort of an idea where they want to go but no more thinking than that I know if I do that though I just end up rambling and I really didn't want to give myself that headache in the Edit trying to make sense of all the stuff that I said so I wanted to be a little bit more prepared than that the second reason is that I really enjoy writing I find it therapeutic and to be honest if I didn't have this channel and need to write scripts for this channel I'd still be writing every day and I just see this as a way to put that right into good use somehow and the third reason is that I really enjoy speaking and I don't just mean talking or rambling on but where you take a bit of time to craft what you want to say and deliver a message to a group of people and they take it on board and it means something to them I've got a huge appreciation for language used well so let me give you some tips on how I write for my videos let's talk about the way first of all I really like writing in coffee shops I don't like writing at home for some reason I think it's because there are just too many distractions there's a television there's computer games there's stuff to do and and even emails can be a distraction as well so I like to go somewhere sit down turn off the internet sit and just type away and I do this coffee shop sometimes although ordering a coffee every single time can get quite expensive so sometimes I will just pitch up at a meeting an hour early or half-hour early and use that early time to sit and type away or sometimes I'll even just sit and write on the bus I don't know why that's true for me it has been for ages I wrote a book about ten years ago and I read the whole thing from one coffee shop overlooking the beach in Cape Town and for some reason being in that space having ordered a coffee which I now four I paid money so I had to use this time well requested money and that there are other people around me having conversations there was a beautiful view out the window those sound like distractions but for some reason the fact that I was there kind of charged my creativity more than when I was sitting alone at home so I'd say find a space where you can sit that charges you creatively and that might be different for you practically speaking I write on my iPad Pro it's the previous generation 10.5 inch and it's got this little connected keyboard the nice thing is because of the connector there's no lag when you're typing which is really good I use an app called I a writer I'm not sponsored by them they don't even know I'm doing this but I know if I don't answer the question now I'll answer it a million times in the comments so that's the name of the app and the reason I like it is because it's very very simple and stripped out so you're working with plain text and it has this nice little feature where it just highlights the sentence that you're working on so you're not worried about the overall structure you're really working on just the little piece of the script that you're working on and it stores it all I can export as PDFs and if you use a subscription model it looks like you can sync between different devices but I haven't gone that route I just export PDFs and use it like that so let's talk about how I write these scripts a lot of you will know that in my 20s I was a priest or pastor or whatever you want to call it and that meant that every week I was preparing messages to give to a group of people and some of you have joked that this channel is just me finding a way to keep preaching and you're probably not wrong there's definitely an element of that because I will always have this part of me that really gets a kick out of speaking to another group of people and having them feel inspired and leaving wanted to change their lives for the better in some way I'll even admit that this channel isn't just about photography for me I talk to you a lot about it I want you to get better at what you do I am passionate about photography myself but I'm also using photography as sort of a Trojan horse to talk about things which i think is even more important like forming a life philosophy for yourself that helps you get out of your own head and out of your own weight and back to leading and more fulfilling a meaningful life my time spent working for church was really good for me in that it taught me how to communicate well because they were a good four years of my life where I was studying full-time and working out how do i structure communication when I put it together and I still use the same loose structure today it's become the skeleton that I hang the points of what I want to say on and even though each video is very different from the next that structures always in place somewhere holding everything together and it comes in three acts let's call the first act of the question I think it's really important in the first few minutes of your video to be clear about the question that you want to tackle with the video that you're about to ask people to watch because I know for me I won't stick around in a video where I'm not sure they know what this video is about don't think about your own videos for a second think about the videos you watch no matter how vibey the music is or swooshy the b-roll is it can only hold you for so long before you realize there being a little bit cagey about what this video is about so somewhere up front I like to state my intent this is what this video is and it should probably be the title of your video as well the reason I say question is because YouTube is actually now the second biggest search engine online now think about that for a second that means Google is number one YouTube is now that number two and then Yahoo and Bing and other search engines come underneath which means people are using a video platform like they use search engines like I had an experience recently where I have my car and the indicator light had gone out and instead of taken to the mechanic I decided to quickly Google could I work this out for myself and I found a video that showed me what bulb I needed to buy and I could prop my phone up on the bonnet of the car and actually fix my own light bulb and I'm not technically minded at all just by following this guy who showed me in 90 seconds because he was clear about the question he was answering with the video because people are on YouTube looking for answers to specific questions if you can be clear in your title and clear in your script what question you're attempting to answer it stands much more of a chance of people finding you where you are remember though that the question in your title the question that you say you're answering in your introduction you have made a promise now that you need to fulfill and answer that question clickbait will only get you so far you might get a lot of draw to one video by putting up click beti titles but you will lose the trust of your audience over time and me personally every thing I say in my title in my intro in terms of what I'm setting up needs to be something I fulfill through the rest of the video or I don't deserve the followers I have here's an example of me setting up the question in a video I wanted to make about how to overcome your created block I hear a lot of creatives say I didn't make anything today because I just didn't feel it but I wonder if we have to feel it before we create something I recently read steven pressfield's book the war of art and in the book he talks about resistance which he says is anything which keeps us from creating he speaks about it like an internal voice which never sleeps but always whispers that that creative act can wait for another day a day which we know if we're honest with ourselves might never come it's like an internal monologue which runs constantly giving us excuses not to risk not to get up not to get out not to pick up the camera or take out the paintbrushes or open up that word document in short is the voice which tells us not to create today we all have our own lists of resistances which we battle but I thought I'd share mine with you and how I deal with them in the hope that it will help you think about your own and help you find ways to beat them let's call the second act of the video the meat of the video in the meat you want to make sure that you're answering the question that you've set up so this is where you're giving the content that you feel you have to give and I always suggest to loosely structure it around three points if you can you can stretch it to two you can stretch it to four or five but to be honest there's something magical for us human beings about three and I understand what a cliche it is that every pastor's sermon has three points but it's not just that think about the world of comedy comedy has the rule of threes where you set up one normal thing one normal thing and hit your punchline on the third it's not supposed to be inhabited and when they're not doing that frying themselves outside they all fling themselves into the sea which is inhabited almost exclusively by things designed to kill you sharks jellyfish swimming knives they're all in there there's something about that number that has a rhythm to us as human beings but it's also a small enough number of points for us to go away and remember those points on our own but remember even if you only have three points in your video you're still only saying one thing you're answering the question you've set up at the beginning I think the mistake a lot of people make is they try and make their videos too complicated they try and dump all the information that they have on a particular subject on people all at once and then they don't spend any time on each because they're trying to go through a long bullet list of you know seven to ten different things they know about something and that just shoots you in the foot it means that you're giving everyone everything you know up front you can't make videos on this subject again plus you're not giving enough information within each of those points for people to actually take that meat away and to work on it so I would always say work on saying less and saying it well and I promise you it will help you in the long run because you'll have more videos to make over time and people will feel like the content they've got out of you is a lot richer and more helpful let's call the third act the benediction now I know benedictions a very church you would and has a lot of connotations to it but I still like the idea and the idea itself is actually a very old idea and all spiritual traditions around the world do this if a teacher stands up to teach something and they get to the end of that message they then give some form of benediction where they wish the people that have just listened to what they've said success and luck are more fulfilled and helpful in healthy lives going forward on that topic they'll say something like may you may you go out there and hug more puppies whatever it happens to be may you my wish for you is that you go out there take something I've given you that it makes your life better somehow and I do exactly the same thing because I think it's a great way to recap the stuff I've just said plus I genuinely like wishing you well it feels good for me to do so all-round it feels like a great way to wrap things up here's an example of me wrapping up a video I did last year on a trip to Cumbria so if you're thinking of taking that leap my best advice to you be to calibrate your expectations so you don't just throw in the towel when the universe doesn't gift you with instant success it will be hard work you will feel like you're falling behind your peers and we'll be tough because you don't feel like you're getting the response for the effort that you're putting in just remember that if progress feels slow it only means you're normal it's slow for most of us learn to learn from rejection make mistakes just make different mistakes every time and experiment because it's the only way you're going to learn you will start in winter because all change does really but spring time will come you just have to ride it out until the seasons change so hopefully by the end of a video I have set up a question with you that I'm promising I'm going to answer I'm giving you the meat of what I want to say which is hopefully the answer to that question and then I'm repeating again in that benediction the end the stuff that I've said and wishing you well in how you can apply it to your own lives and that's the structure of every video and I'm often working to hide that structure and not make it too predictable and change things around but loosely speaking that's the journey I want to take you on every time now let's talk about what you're gonna say this is a tough one I get asked a lot on YouTube Sean I want to start a YouTube channel what do you think I should make a YouTube channel on the simple answer that is there is no way I can tell you I just can't tell you what you should be saying and I know how intimidating the blank pages but that is your journey to go on to work out what you have to give from yourself that other people need to know what you have to share with the rest of us what I will say is if you're not being deliberate about putting things in it's naive to think that you're gonna have useful things coming out I mean I'm very very deliberate about reading a lot about listening to podcasts about thinking about things I want to talk about about talking to friends about it so that I'm constantly mulling over those ideas and thinking about them in a way that hopefully when the time comes I will have useful things to say about those things I like the idea of ruminating I mean the word ruminate has that double meaning one meaning being that you know when we sit and we put things in our brain and we think about them but the other the direct meaning of the word is is for animals that chew grass like goats and cows they ruminate and they have this process where they eat grass and then they swallow it down and then they vomit it back up some point during the day so it's a bit gross and then they chew it some more to get all the nutrients out of it they possibly can swallow it down later they'll vomit it back up into their mouth chew it some more and swallow it down that's what ruminating is it's bringing things back up internally to suck all the goodness out of it that we possibly can so I take that really seriously thinking about things reading things listening to things having conversations so that I'm thinking I'm putting things into my brain and I'm bringing them back up during the day to process them and turn them over and then when I have an idea I'll write it down I use a notebook which I carry with me every day just to jot down ideas and I've also got a Google Doc going as well just for ideas on videos I might want to do and I know when I've ruminated on them enough and they're ready to go and I can sit down and hammer out a script but I don't rush it I wait for that moment when I feel like I've got enough to say that it's worth your time now let me talk quickly about how I actually use the script once it's finished I print the PDF out and I have that with me when I film but I don't use the words on the page I think script gives this idea that I'm trying to memorize every word or I'm using a teleprompter to try and say the exact thing that I wanted to write down the exact words aren't important to me at that point at all it's the fact that I've done the preparation and I can then go ahead and film confident that I've at least thought this thing through if I just tried to say a memorized script to you word-for-word you'd feel it and it wouldn't feel authentic so I'm always trying to ride that balance between being prepared but also just saying it in the moment and this is how I do it so this is the script that I took with me to Iceland if you haven't seen that video it's called time and what I do is I take those sections that I used and I cut them up physically into pieces of paper sort of this size and these then go into my camera backpack and next to it sometimes I'll just write like a little idea about what sort of place I'd like to film this and then when I'm driving around I'll see you spot I think that's going to work well to film in I'll pull out the piece of paper of the bit that I want to say to camera and I will read it through once and then it goes back in my bag and I don't touch it again and then I'll say that piece to camera two three maybe four times and pick the best version and the point when I'm saying it is not to say exactly the words on the page I just then trust that I'm gonna remember the flow of it and that's important and I also want you to see me thinking about what I'm gonna say next I don't want it to feel too prepared I want to be prepared but I want to still be thinking of the wording as I'm going along and that's how I ride that line between being prepared and also thinking about what I'm saying and trying to make it authentic in the moment you have to find the way that works for you because you don't want to be on the one side so over prepared you're trying to remember wording because there's gonna feel like a speech it's gonna smack of the politician and people aren't gonna believe you and they won't believe you care about what you're actually saying and on the other side you could be so unprepared that you just waffle and don't really say anything for me good communication is in that sweet spot in the middle see it's time for that benediction and I hope that with what I've told you whether it's in your work day-to-day you do speaking of some kind of meetings or maybe you want to get into public speaking or maybe specifically like I said in this video you want to work out how to speak on your YouTube videos and craft what you want to say I hope this video has given you something to think about in terms of preparing what you want to communicate I'll warn you that there's a difference between the method and the style I've given you my method for preparing these things and you're welcome to use it obviously and adapt it and use it in your own way but don't try copy my style I think we can all tell when we're watching a channel and some youtuber is trying to rip another youtuber style and I think it comes across as disingenuous and the whole thing about YouTube is we're all on there because we're hungry for authenticity so the way you're going to do that is to work out how you speak saying things the way that you would say them so people actually get the feeling that you care about what you're saying and if you're stuck with the blank page read more listen more create more mental space for you to think things through because I promise you the more you put in and the more space you give yourself the more that creative flow will become unblocked and you'll start to write more freely I think if you're going to script your videos on a platform like YouTube success is going to come down to balancing out how prepared you are versus how in the moment you can be and saying things with your because it's going to take you having the courage to authentically and inspirationally and originally tell us the things you're learning from your life so that we can go away and change our lives for the better thanks again to Squarespace for sponsoring this video if you need a new website or a domain especially if you are creative check them out they're a brilliant option I've run my whole business this year off my website and this being so the first year of freelancing properly and I couldn't have been easier I have had my gallery up there about pages I have made sure that some videos are posted in there as well I put up a store this year and payments from the store flowed smoothly I can check the analytics on stuff like that everything was there and couldn't have been simpler and when things did go wrong or become confusing they had staff there to help me 24/7 which was really really useful so if you're looking to start a business photography or video and you want a website definitely check them out start your free trial today at squarespace.com and go to Squarespace comm forward slash Sean Tucker to get 10% of your first purchase [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Sean Tucker

Views: 140,635

Keywords: script, script writing, youtube scripts, writing on ipad, iA writer, ios writing app, good communication, 3 act communication, how to speak to camera, how to write for videos, writing for video, photography, sean tucker, writing for youtube, scripting for youtube, speaking to camera, confident communication, black and white video, ruminate

Id: M-IeuQe8Eic

Length: 19min 25sec (1165 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 09 2018