Writing scripts against your own attention keeps them natural

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 8:38

   I'll just kind of go, I don't know, some random person's tweet here. Maybe like this one. and i'll literally change this text to my my tweets text and i'll just do this i'll be like did my eyes stop i'll just ask myself did i myself stop on what this is saying and if i stop that's like step one for me on testing if i myself would kind of check this out and so that's kind of my number one rule for regardless of twitter instagram youtube anything am i gonna stop on this am i even gonna read the first sentence because if i don't read the first sentence there's no way i'm going into this also like look at the first frame of the video it's very purposely xcode why because i know that initially curious developers are probably going to be interested by this not like actual video editors right so it's purposely xcode i purposely

2. 9:24

   zoom in right here to this part to show because the product is so small the product is like this little triangle yeah that kind of helps you out most people when they're scrolling see the first three seconds hey everyone so this is zoom and i know what is that you know at least at least while you're while you're scrolling and you're moving it around so people can see that there's something moving there i think that um you can go into details all day but the reason i got this i know this stuff now is because there's hundreds and thousands of videos i've made that nobody has cared about yeah i think that's the biggest thing like yeah i don't want people to watch this video and think i gotta make this hook and do this and this and so this was this first one off the cuff this was almost entirely unplanned.

3. 10:02

   And so a lot of this was just you and instinct and how you put this together based on things you've learned. Walk us through another video that maybe you planned out a little bit more in advance. Because one thing that's surprising to me, you actually write a script for all of your videos. And I think anybody that's seen one of your videos would be surprised by that because you seem like you're just talking off the cup.

4. 10:21

   How do you do that? Like you're very prepared, but it doesn't seem formal and stuffy and like you're reading. Totally. How can you teach somebody else to do that? If I like reading it, then that means it'll probably sound good if I say it out loud as well. Not always, but sometimes. And so this is one example of a script I wrote for a video that I did yesterday. And again, it's just super simple. Like, do I enjoy reading this?

5. 10:45

   Like, would I read this if I just someone texted this to me? Yeah, what's going through your head? Are you imagining the audience listening to this? Or how do you evaluate if something is actually good and interesting? For me, it's always I'm the audience. Like, would I be interested in what the script is saying? and so honestly this script is actually not that strong um but i still recorded the video because you got to be launching in the first kind of little bit am i getting across what i'm doing um why is it important like you can get across so much in just 10 seconds what you're doing why it's important let's get into it you know that's what the first 10 seconds of any kind of video should be about because both these videos are one minute long right it's kind of like a movie you know a movie is an hour and a half two hours and the first 20 minutes is just a setup

6. 11:26

   but it's a two-hour thing and so for a video that's one minute long you need to set up but it should only be like 10 20 so i write this down and so this case i said hi i want to share a new demo of our new demo of our new age interface when talking to our users blah blah blah um and then getting into the demo and so for me this is kind of this is kind of how i think through it you know before i get in front of the camera the worst part is when you're in front of the camera and you're like what am i saying you know like you have you have nothing to ground yourself yeah It's good to ground yourself. Yeah, you start with the script and then you move on to some of the visuals. How do you