Explaining the Obvious: Marketing Your Product with Screencast Scripting

by Don Wallace

Introduction

Software products are often best explained by showing, not just by telling. The modern "show and tell" that you can use to effectively showcase your software product is the screencast.

A screencast is a digital recording of a computer workstation screen that depicts an unseen operator using a software application. The visual portion of this "movie" is created using one of many existing software products made for the purpose. (Examples: Lotus ScreenCam; Camtasia Studio.)

A carefully planned screencast presentation - which includes voice-over narration using a script that is carefully prepared with attention to the visual subject matter - will create an exceptionally professional and positive impression for your product.

If you want to promote and evangelize your product, then a narrated screencast that is carefully scripted will let you run with the big boys. This blog entry shows you exactly how to arrive at a polished result.

Low-Effort Screencasting - Feasible?

There are three choices available to you for screencast audio production:

• Produce a silent screencast, or use a musical accompaniment.
• Ad-lib the narration: connect a microphone and start talking (or, narrate as you record the screencast.)
• Script the narration, as this article recommends.
  

Most screencasts are ad libbed: the person who is operating the software talks into a microphone and explains as she is performing actions.

Besides the consistency and quality that the scripting approach described in this blog can provide, a script allows you to easily outsource the voice portion of the project. There are many providers of high quality, professional voice services available online, such as Voices.com, which will record your script using professional voice talent, in some instances for extremely modest prices.

How to Create Effective Screencast Scripts from Scratch

The following is an outline of the basic technique that I used to develop screencasts for a client earlier in 2008. Since the resulting screencasts combined with professionally recorded voice-overs appear to have created a stunning result for my client, I feel very certain that this "recipe" will work for many other software products where a live demonstration of the software is used to reinforce the marketing message.

Here are two pieces of general advice.

• Repeat yourself: The process of script creation is iterative. You may record a screencast that you believe is well-paced, easy to understand, and that "should" be easy to narrate. Once you start developing the script, you may find that things fall apart when you actually try to plan the wording. This is to be expected, and I believe that most screencasts will have to be re-recorded or at least edited a few times in the process of developing a workable script.
  
  
• It's all about time: It will be for the very best if you are working with a screencast video that has a time position counter somewhere in view in the video frame, and which also has a "pause" control and a position slide adjustment. Not all video capture packages produce these features by default. If the video does not contain a time position counter, then you will have to use an external timer, and errors can creep in and accumulate in the timing of your script.

Here is the basic flow of screencast script production.

1. You need to first watch and preview the "new" screencast. Maybe twice. Get the "feel" of the screencast.
2. Ask the client or stakeholder questions - detailed and also broad-agenda - to enhance your understanding of the video. Example questions: "What the heck are you trying to do here at 1:34?" Or, "What is the whole point of this demo?"
3. Start writing rough draft. Select time points at which segments are to be spoken. So you will wind up with a list of paragraphs, with time stamps noted in minute:second format at the start of each paragraph. You will have to view the video and pause it continually and rewind it in order to write each paragraph.
   
4. Preview the screencast again, this time reading your script aloud at the prescribed time points. You should make a point to speak methodically and more slowly than you would in normal conversation (as an example, pay close attention to the cadence that newscasters use for reporting on broadcasts.)
5. You are striving for a "Goldilocks" effect - just the right length of material. The purpose of the previous step is to verify that the words you write will fit correctly into the time slots that you are working with. As you complete reading each paragraph aloud, the video time position counter should not yet exceed the time that you have assigned to the start of the next paragraph. In other words, running-over is an error, and you must correct it either by somehow shortening that paragraph, or by editing the video recording, and inserting a pause at the appropriate point. And gaps of more than 5 seconds or so in an otherwise very "chatty" narration feel awkward.
   
6. The video itself may have timing problems that you cannot compensate for by scripting alone. Problems that I have encountered tend to be issues like not allowing "dead" time (a motionless video) at the start and the end of the recording in order to allow for introductory and final words. Another problem is the operator in the video doing very complex actions too fast to insert a reasonable explanation into the script. It may be necessary to re-record segments or to insert pauses.
7. Edit your copy after the video has been edited, to refine the timing. Use the "speak aloud" technique to re-test each modified paragraph. You may have to adjust the timing starts of the paragraphs that follow if time has been inserted or removed from the video.
   
8. Some steps above may require an iteration or two in order to arrive at narration that you believe represents your product well.
   
9. After completing some scripts, you will find that you can skip or accelerate some of the steps above (for example, identifying too-short sections of the video) as you learn what to watch for. You will also develop a feeling very quickly for the time that each line of your script requires to be spoken, so you will soon learn enough to minimize the effort of revising each passage.
   

To summarize these steps: watch, learn and get the "feeling" of the screencast. Work on understanding the points that should be conveyed to the audience. Then write a script that, when spoken, fits the actions that are shown in the screencast. You will need to write this script as a series of paragraphs that are crafted to be spoken within fairly restrictive time limits.

What I Didn't Explain

I explained a way to produce screencast scripts. What I didn't explain are the following essential techniques and skills: operation of the screencast recording software; video editing; selection of voice over talent (voice actors); and, the copywriting itself. Each of these subjects could be covered in its own blog entry.

Conclusion: My Own Show-and-Tell

Screencast scripting is a simple procedure, but is somewhat tedious with mechanical bits. There is quite a bit of fussing required to achieve a good result. And it does feel a bit like you're being a movie producer. I think the results are well worth the trouble.

If you would like to see the end result of the type of planning that I advocate in this article, please visit my client's site and press the green "View Demo" button.

(Please consider recommending Ernic Software's excellent product, Optitask, to your IT department.)

And if you don't wish to undertake this kind of project yourself, I am certainly for hire.