Words if necessary, but not necessarily a wordy manifesto

Last week I had a pretty decent idea for a personal creative project. I’m not going to give much away, but when I shifted from light bulb to capturing the project on paper, I found myself doing something unusual: I didn’t just puke a bunch of words onto the page. I love using words as a cheap way to prototype an idea, but taglines and paragraphs aren’t always the best approach.

This time out, what felt most natural and appropriate for my web-based creative project was a script for a 60-second video. Understand, however, that I’m not doing a Kickstarter or a MegaGogo campaign. Having an explanatory video for my creative project certainly isn’t a bad idea, but it wasn’t an obvious first choice either.

The reason I mention my script-first approach is that I tend to overlook video due to my print journalism background. Despite all the digital copywriting and content strategy work I’ve done over the past five years, my default definition of content is still words, with the occasional nod to icons and infographics. In my defence, video can be expensive and time-consuming if you don’t want it to look like garbage.

I really enjoyed writing the script, especially because it quickly turned into something playful and fun, rather than yet another mini-manifesto. The script also helped me visually define the tone and style of the project – something that might inform the look and feel of the site design down the road. There’s also an energy and pace to the video that would be very difficult to convey through any other format.

Although it’s far from exhaustive, the script offers a concise project definition: here’s what I decided to do, and why. And, finally, I can take the key messages from the video and use them to develop headlines and body copy. That’s a lot of heavy lifting for a 130 word script.