Explainer video scripts

What an explainer script is

An explainer script is the whole spoken text of a short video, usually about ninety seconds long, that takes one complicated offer and makes it obvious to somebody meeting it for the first time. It has a fixed shape: the problem the viewer already has, the mechanism that deals with it, the result they end up with, and one instruction at the end.

It is not a general video script, which can be any length and built any way the subject needs. An explainer is the constrained case, and the constraint is the point of it. It is also not a demonstration: an explainer tells a viewer what the thing does and why that should matter, while a demo script shows it working, screen by screen, for somebody who has already understood the offer.

When you need one

You need an explainer when you have to say the same long thing to every prospect. If your sales calls all begin with eight minutes of describing how the service works before anyone mentions money, that eight minutes is an explainer waiting to be written. The video does it once, at the top of the home page, and the call starts further along than it used to.

It also suits a business with a model people mishear: a subscription that sounds like a purchase, or a managed service that sounds like software. If you correct the same misunderstanding every week, that misunderstanding is the first line of the script.

You do not need one if the offer fits in a sentence. Something plain, sold to people who already know they want it, is better served by a clear one-sentence value proposition and a well-written page.

What goes in it

Writing for the ear is not the same as writing for the page. A reader can go back over a clause; a listener cannot. A web page read aloud sounds wrong inside two sentences, because the sentences are too long and the headings carrying the structure have vanished. Every line of an explainer is written to be said once and understood once.

• The problem, in the viewer's words. Fifteen seconds at most, using the phrasing they use rather than the phrasing your trade uses.
• The mechanism. How the thing works, in three or four sentences. This is where every draft swells, and where most of the cutting happens.
• The result. What is different afterwards, stated concretely: what they stop doing, what they get back, what they no longer have to know.
• One instruction. A single next step, said once, with the address or the button named on screen at the same moment it is spoken.
• The screen notes. A second column saying what the viewer is looking at on every line, so an editor can work from the document without a meeting.

The hardest part is deciding what to leave out. Ninety seconds is a little over two hundred spoken words, and almost every business has four hundred it believes are essential. Choosing the half that goes in is the work you are buying.

What you get

The script. A two-column document formatted for reading aloud: spoken text on the left with a running time marked at each section, screen notes on the right. Before it reaches you it is read aloud against a stopwatch, at the pace the presenter really speaks, and cut until it lands inside the agreed run time.

The prompter version. The spoken column on its own, in large type, broken into breath-length lines for a prompter app or a sheet taped beside the lens.

The on-screen text list. Every caption, title and lower third in order on one page, which is the first thing an editor asks for. If that side of it needs proper attention, on-screen text and lower thirds takes it further.

One round of changes. After you read it aloud, anything that does not sound like the person saying it is rewritten.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A Saskatoon company sells monitored backup to dental practices. The offer is awkward to describe: it is not software the practice installs, it is not a one-time setup, and the monthly fee covers a person checking that a restore actually works. The existing home page explains it in six paragraphs. The owner's first attempt at a script runs four hundred and forty words and opens with the year the company was founded.

The rewrite keeps two hundred and fifteen. It opens on the thing every practice manager fears, which is being told the backup existed but did not restore. The mechanism is three sentences: files copied nightly, a restore tested every month, a named person signing off on that test. The result is one sentence, the instruction one line with a phone number on screen while it is said. Pricing tiers, data centres and certifications are cut and moved into the page beneath the video. Read aloud, the script times at eighty-eight seconds.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What the offer is, who keeps misunderstanding it, where the video will sit and how long it is allowed to run. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Run time, one script or a set, and whether screen notes are needed, agreed before anything starts.
3. The input. The explanation you currently give on calls, in whatever form it exists, and the objections you hear most. A recording of you explaining it once is worth more than a document.
4. The draft. Four to five working days for a single explainer. Timed aloud before it is sent.
5. Your read-through. The presenter reads it out at their own pace. Anything that trips them is cut.
6. The final. Script, prompter version and on-screen text list, in one folder.

What it costs

An explainer script is quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call, because the range is wide: one ninety-second script for an offer you already sell is a small piece of work, and a set of four covering a product family is not. The pricing page sets out the four ways I work. The number is fixed in writing before anything begins, and it does not move unless you change the brief.

What happens next

Most people do three things afterwards. The finished video gets captions cut straight from the script, so the caption text is exact rather than guessed by software. The page the video sits on usually needs bringing into line with the promise the video now makes, which is a page rewrite. And the sentence that survived all the cutting is generally the clearest sentence the business owns, so it is worth carrying into the key messages everything else gets written from. None of that is assumed. The script is a finished piece of work on its own, and you can shoot it and stop there.