Meet the Secret Scriptwriter Getting YouTubers Millions of Views

listen to this clip and in doing so he sidestepped an absolutely massive Financial Risk that not many full-time YouTubers ever think about but I'm gonna come back to that so why is Thomas Frank pretty much stopped posting on his main Channel and why has that allowed him to make even more money than ever did you see what he did there essentially the audience needs to know pretty much at all times what it is they're waiting around for next we're solving the ultimate question how does he make so much money that's what we're waiting around for

but not losing sight of the fact that you need to have these minute payoffs kind of throughout the video that serve as building blocks to that ultimate thing that's George Blackman a YouTube scriptwriter who's been hired by YouTubers like Ali abdall Mike shake and Ed from film Booth to write videos for them like the one you just saw scripting is one of the most important parts in the video making process that you are overlooking George says that it can make or break your video if you want that full creative control as I say you you

need to know what all the beats are that you're going to hit unless your audience knows why am I giving this guy or girl my time for the next minute it's very easy for them to just say I can't be bothered to wait another 10 minutes to get to the end of this so in this episode you'll learn how a great video starts the four hat writing process to make better videos tips for finding and hiring a scriptwriter and how to craft the perfect call to action to end your videos where does a great video

Start how do we how do we get this thing started so that we're giving ourselves a good chance for this video working so the idea generation is obviously a big one and I know you've spoken about that with Paddy Galloway and that's like the big thing that kind of comes up a lot of the time is is the idea generation I'm usually less involved in that phase my role tends to come in as like how do we once we've got that idea how do we frame it and that that's a huge one and I think

something creators often think is like oh I'm excited to talk about this topic and I know roughly what I would want to say about it maybe it comes from a conversation you've had with somebody uh at a cafe or at a pub or something and it feels like this is something I could intuitively just talk really compellingly about for a while but in my experience and what I find with the the one-to-one calls that I do with creators is that your first idea is often not going to be the best uh the best one so

I take an example I was speaking to somebody recently who they wanted to talk about Hollywood reboots right which is obviously a trend at the moment has been a trend for a little while now the the kind of incessant rebooting of basically everything we know and love from our childhood and they came to me saying like I want I want to talk about this and but they weren't fully sure like how to approach it and their first instinct was like why don't we just talk about you know the pros and the cons of doing Hollywood

reboots like yeah why it's good why it's bad which is like cool like you could you could do that but by itself that feels again like a conversation you might have with somebody down the pub a second angle that we talked about and that they came to me with was oh why don't we talk about why Hollywood keeps doing it right like why when they have the option to make new and fresh and interesting things do they continue to reboot stuff but again that seemed like a question that you can answer immediately either intuitively or

you can Google it but the answer is money because it makes money that's not an interesting thing and if you're going to try and delay revealing that answer to your audience for 10 15 20 minutes or like for hours if it's a video essay potentially that's not something that is going to convince many people to stick around because it's quite intuitive but then we landed on the idea of oh what if we talk about why do we keep going to see it why is it something that I know I'm not going to enjoy in all

likelihood balance of probability I've seen enough reboots I've been frustrated enough times going to the the movies that I'm not going to enjoy seeing this but why is it that I keep giving Hollywood my money so we answer that question easily it makes the money who makes them that money me but what so like it's almost like an invasive look into like my own behavior like the sort of thing I think I will have it will have crossed my mind as an audience member in the past but having that presented in front of you it's

like why I can't remember the title we came up with but presenting it framing it as a look into like you and your behavior again that's quite a specific example but I think that's that's basically the kind of the checklist that we you want for how you frame your video it's got to be something that's interesting for you it's got to be something that's deeply interesting for your audience uh it's got to evoke some kind of emotion like the kind of emotional response I was having just then the like kind of frustration or or whatever

it is and then it's got to open multiple curiosity apps it's got to be the kind of thing you couldn't just Google and find out very very quickly because again we're trying to convince people to give us a significant amount of their time when at the click of a button they've got thousands of other choices so hitting on that right framing of the idea is uh is is Paramount well I think I'm hearing and tell me if I'm hearing this incorrectly yeah but uh I'm thinking out loud a little bit ideas are not the same

as topics like you can have a topic that you want to explore that is not inherently the idea for the video the idea is almost like a Russian nesting doll inside of the topic to say how do I how do I frame and and almost like carve out how I'm going to address this topic yeah that's exactly right going to put it better that's the 16th answer for what I just said so what are some of the trends you see as to what that behavior is or what what mistakes people are making early on and

throughout the beginning portion of a video that causes people to lose interest in tune out it usually comes down to the idea of payoff as it's umbrella kind of term essentially the audience needs to know pretty much at all times what it is they're waiting around for next which sounds pretty obvious but it can be very easy I think when you are in the process of making a 10 minute video to forget to signpost those things frequently throughout throughout the video so although you might be doing a tutorial video where you're showing them by the

end of the video You're Gonna know how to do this or it might be for example I wrote a a breakdown of how Thomas Frank makes however many hundreds of thousands of dollars he makes a month we're solving the ultimate question how does he make so much money that's what we're waiting around for but in the kind of you know the seven eight minutes before that what are the things that we are the little kind of aha moments the little tidbits that we are excited to find out about in the next minute or 30 seconds

even and so I think it's about figuring out first of all what that big the grand payoff is and I've actually written about this the newsletter that I've written that's going out today is is about identifying that grand payoff but not losing sight of the fact that you need to have these minute payoffs kind of throughout the video that serve as building blocks to that ultimate thing and unless you're signposting that unless your audience knows why am I giving this guy or a girl my time for the next minute it's very easy for them to

just sing I can't be bothered to wait another 10 minutes to get to the end of this these types of signposts and planning for how and when the payoffs happen throughout the video it sounds like something that's difficult to do without thought or intention yes like it seems like I'm probably not going to walk in hit record and just do these things really well you're right yeah this is actually funnily enough uh earlier this this week or last week maybe I did Justin's Creator debates podcast and we were talking uh about script writing and whether

you should script or whether you should just wing it and there's of course a place for just winging it and especially I think the conclusion we came to is when you're maybe first getting started in all of this it feels like a lot to learn how to be a videographer and a sound mixer and also a scriptwriter and a Storyteller and all this stuff maybe it is okay to just get some bullet points and just get used to speaking to camera but I think if you want Total creative control over the package that you're putting

out there has to be some thought when you sit down uh you you want to have it mapped out as as much as you possibly can and it's okay it's not like you have to stick word for word to what you've written if you feel like you need to skip over a little bit or you feel the urge to just like rephrase something in the moment totally fine but if you want that full creative control as I say you you need to know what all the beats are that you're going to hit because if you're

going to sit down and just start talking it's very easy to forget what did I say a couple of minutes ago have I teed this up properly have I probably foreshadowed what's coming next does this make sense as a step by step for my audience to reach that grand payoff it's harder to tell if you haven't got a plan I love that you you call out the fact that you don't have to have the entire process dialed to a 10 in all the steps within it when you get started because I think that's really important

for a lot of people listening to hear which is like yeah we're laying out how people at the top level are approaching this and you can have that in your uh windshield I guess it's not your rear view mirror you can have that in front of you and no that's what you're working towards but you don't have to be there right now after a quick break George and I dive into the specifics of writing an effective script so stick around we'll be right back if you know me you know how much I believe in memberships

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and let them know that Jay sent you so we have an idea that hits those check boxes and we feel good about it now what happens to get this thing written the key thing and it feels like a real annoyance for a lot of people and I know as soon as you hear the words come out my mouth it's gonna feel like oh an immediate stomach drop but drafting up an audience Avatar so you can be laser focused on basically everything the language you're using how you're constructing your scripts the topics you choose all of

that you you just you need to know who you're talking to and it's the same in marketing it's the same in everything like this is basically Marketing in this in this idea of an audience Avatar are you suggesting that that's something I do for my channel and each video is a uh addressing that audience or are you saying each video we need to create this Avatar it depends usually I mean have one for your channel is definitely what you would need overall but there will be some times where maybe you're looking to reach an audience

that is not part of your usual cover and you're actually looking to grow the channel in a different direction in which case and I know this is a bit of a stressful annoying thing to do you could consider doing that I think it will make your life down the line when you're actually coming to write it much easier because it actually cuts off the number of choices you have at a given point for how you structure it the language you use again we can come more onto that uh in a moment but um it's certainly

an option you have but you should definitely have one for your channel as a whole yeah and when you're doing this what level of depth are you thinking are you naming this person are you talking about their demographic information like when is the Avatar clear enough um I I think it depends I've I well when I worked with Ali I saw for a course that he was launching uh somebody was doing the whole like they have a name they have an exact occupation like all of that stuff I've never tended to go that deep and

that may be an error on my part for me it's like just using all the opportunities you have to speak to your audience and constructing an image as best you can just from the responses they they give it's then Gathering all of that information into a notion table or a document or something like that and kind of just piecing together from that who it is that you're talking to I've never gone as far down the road as naming them but that is something that some people prefer to do I just that that to me feels

like one step Beyond uh what I need to do I'd rather go on with writing all right so we've got the Avatar dialed in once you have that what's the next step then it's kind of a free-for-all uh in terms of the ideas that you're getting down on the page and this is um the kind of process I follow when I'm writing basically any script it's like a four hat structure and the first hat is what I call the artists where it's free-flowing you're just getting ideas down on the page you don't have to think

about the structure you don't have to think about how one thing is going to lead to the next all you really need from all of that is to have figured out what that grand payoff is what the big moment uh that we're going to focus on at the end is what the audience is sticking around for but beyond that it's just what do you instinctively think this video should contain and you just go for it and you don't think that's my favorite how to wear so four hat structure number one artist what's number two the

second hat is the architect hat is that a hard hat would they would they wear a hard hat walking around I think so I think that well I don't know that's that's a score of like a construction hat more of a construction hat okay well you know what maybe that works the architect the Constructor however you like to phrase it and that is where you start to flesh out that structure right and that's where from all these ideas that you've got you start to eliminate the ones that you realize aren't going to be super interesting

and you figure out the the necessary steps that will build up towards that final payoff and this is a key Point especially when working with clients where you need to basically get that okayed with them because again they'll have had this idea with you you'll have kind of figured out what the framing is going to be but now you need to clarify with them whether or not this is the order of events they want to talk about this is how they had kind of foreseen it in their in their mind so getting that structure dialed

in is is part two let's keep going part three the third hat is the writer's hat I don't know what kind of hat a writer wears I I'm not much of a hat wearer myself maybe I need to like commission my own hat I don't know so that's where again you're now starting to expand the bit in between this kind of list that you have right where you've got all the key points that you're going to hit now you're connecting the dots essentially then needs to be something progressing regressing or changing at any point in

your script and it can be hard to see this before you sit down and start to really write it out in full and something that I've learned from one of my clients recently is that at the top of the scripts now I'm writing a couple of sentences about what is the goal so the goal either of if it's an entertainment video of the person who's in it doing the thing or if it's something educational what is the goal of the person watching like what do they want and what does success look like then what does

failure look like so again entertainment video what does it look like what what is it they do that is bad and takes them away from the goal um sees them regress away from the goal or again if it's the the viewer we're talking about in an educational video it's what other kind of uh obstacles to their success what are the things that they're worried about the objections they might have and then the final the third thing is emotion what emotions might they feel as a result of either the successes or the failures just having that

at the top of my script is something I then refer back to constantly so when you're writing the scripts you want to be thinking is anything happening here in this kind of paragraph or this segment of the video are we progressing towards something are we failing away from something or is there some kind of change of emotion going on and again what you're trying to avoid when you're doing all of this is too much task switching so it's kind of again like almost another free-flowing point where you're not thinking too much about retention at this

point you're just thinking can I get from A to B to C in a way that makes sense maybe you're thinking of a kind of half form b-roll ideas and visual cues and things that you might want to be be putting in with all of this but again the key thing here is making sure that by the end of your time as the writer you've got the thing that gets you from the start to the finish and that brings you on to the Wizards hat and this is where you now start thinking about the retention

stuff and there's I guess a lot of stuff we could talk about here but particularly when it comes to payoffs it's thinking and this is something I do sometimes it is literally going through the video and highlighting every time I think there is a moment where the audience is going to go oh or they feel like they've learned something that they didn't know before going through and highlighting that stuff makes it incredibly visually evident if you have huge sways of the script where the audience isn't learning anything where they necessarily don't know what's coming up

next and that's when you can really start to play around with that structure and think okay where are these kind of reveals that I want to put into the script where are these these big moments of emotional release or whatever it is it's hard to be too specific when we could be talking about a tutorial or an entertainment video or whatever it is I really swear by highlighting whatever is payoffs or it could be something else but it helps you get a sense of the visual structure of the script and that's where you can start

to rearrange things I think the tendency that I have when I get into script writing is being very literal and almost like maybe too economical you know it's it's very utilitarian especially in the first draft where it's like all right I want to explain this thing to you and if I'm not careful I end up with like uh two minute video because I've just like said everything in the most efficient way possible but I realize it's not actually necessarily helping the viewer because saying something efficiently doesn't mean that it's then heard understood so talk to

me about when I'm wearing my writer's hat which I think is where a lot of your specialty comes in and The Wizard as you're saying but I think the writer is where a lot of people are probably struggling the most obviously how does that process look and feel you know I want to understand more about how this looks when you're actually digging in and writing the script yeah so I really like what you said there about um efficiency won't necessarily equal something learned and remembered essentially something really cool that I picked up from somebody that

I was doing a one-to-one with uh actually I think I was doing this I was reviewing one of one of their scripts and I actually saw in their notes they had this uh this kind of thing and like uh bold starred uh text it was uh make the audience feel smart and that really stuck with me and that's something that I think about a lot now so with the example you just gave right where you're super efficient and you talk through the video and you're done in two minutes they've got the information that's all well

and good but it's not memorable and they haven't had to engage particularly hard to receive that information so something I uh that I see all the time with scripts that need a little work and it's such a simple fix is giving those payoffs a little bit too early and then feeling like to pad the runtime you then have to talk about it more after you've kind of given away what the answer is and that might seem like something you think well I wouldn't do that if I've given away the the answer why would I keep

talking about it but you see all the time like listicles are a real Bandit for this where you're like okay 10 things that I can't uh go without when I leave the house and it's like number one my house keys and immediately I'm watching that thinking well I know why your house keys because you need to get back in the house it's easy but then with this sort of lit school you'll see them then say I always have my house keys with me and I always keep them in my pocket because I need to remember

where I've kept them so that when I get back to the house later I'm like I I get it I got it like I figured this out 10 minutes ago again not making the audience feel smart you give that payoff a little later and this is again I know you spoke with that about this and this is his real kind of uh zone of Genius is doing something that gives the audience a clue as to what's coming up but without revealing what it is we're going to talk about so he's like the king of YouTube

metaphors right um and that was something that was really fun when I was working with him it was was getting to uh come up with really interesting metaphorical ways of explaining things and so as I say the tendency to pad things out there's no point doing it if you've already given the payoff you need to come up with a metaphor uh or give them a kind of interesting route in to the point that you're about to make before making the point and again you can do this really easily literally just switch the order they come

in the script ah this is good this reminds me of a video we did on the channel about uh my revenue streams from last year and it's like here the the revenue streams that I put in place those videos a lot of people watching that are probably like just tell me the seven things and I I felt I felt like I needed to have context in between but it was a struggle for like what you're saying context set is additive and useful versus me just trying to pad the runtime that's a good way to think

about it this is why I hate reading any article that's written for SEO because they're all this way but why when I think about some of my best work or some of the work that's been received the best it's when I kind of presume Intelligence on the part of the audience and it's having a high level conversation without having to dumb it down much and assuming that people keep up with it you're right in fact I had to the the boxer who was training Michelle karre in that recent video she did and if you've seen

this incredible video um that she she made a couple of months ago the the I think it was the the bronze British Olympic boxer from 2008 or whatever was it was the guy who was training her in that video and he actually came to me for a video uh review which I put in my newsletter and I think this is one of the most simple examples of showing how you can like easily switch these things over is he was doing a video about uh like boxing techniques uh if you're a short person fighting a taller

person and every time he would be like the technique is this I'm gonna move much closer very quickly and that means I can get a punch in before they even see me and then he would demonstrate it and my suggestion to him was like how how simple is this like you this is a perfect opportunity to show something visually and literally ask the audience like can you see what I'm doing here before then explaining it because that's what we talk about it engages the brain it becomes like a puzzle immediately they're now watching it thinking

oh I think is he doing the thing where he moves really quickly so that they can't get a punch in and then he reveals it and you get this little dopamine hit because you're like oh I worked that out I wasn't just giving it on a plate I wasn't told it I had to engage and figure it out and that's just a way more satisfying experience for the viewer this works cross-platform too I realize this is what makes some of Paddy Galloway's threads really good on Twitter is he'll give a little bit of information he'll

give like a views or Impressions chart and say why do we think this happened and replies just fill up with people making guesses really really useful to engage the viewer with the content that's that's a really good way of thinking about it yeah is there something you believe to be true it could be related to script writing it could be related to YouTube it could be related related to anything as a Creator something you believe to be true but you do not yet have the data to support I think this is uh something which I

would say because my livelihood depends on it but I believe that a lot of channels would benefit from hiring a scriptwriter but I think it's something that hasn't caught on yet as much as getting an editor or a thumbnail designer right most channels that move Beyond a certain point that they're taking themselves seriously they'll end up with an editor or a thumbnail designer pretty soon but a scriptwriter is something that I think the ROI isn't always completely clear and I think it is something that is maybe harder to onboard someone into that role because it's

so much about uh voice which is not easy thing to pick up editing style and I'm not an editor so I wouldn't want to get hundreds of angry editors uh coming after me in the night but I feel like you've got such a a clear visual reference for the style that you're trying to to mimic that's something you can start to pick up writing is is a lot more about you have to just spend so much time kind of listening speaking out loud and I literally will sit here and read out loud in the voice

of the person I'm trying to write for the script that I've written for them but it's a difficult thing to onboard however the ROI of a writer I think overall is huge whether that is just in a research capacity to save you that upfront time but in having somebody on the team who is specifically devoted to thinking about the nuts and bolts structure of all the stuff in the way that we've spoken about today it it takes a lot of time to sit down and really think through all of this stuff um and I think

a lot of teams would benefit from having a writer I think it just comes down to having the patience to onboard somebody and even find somebody because I get this all the time I get asked for recommendations all the time and I don't know who to recommend um because there just aren't that many people that have come out the woodwork yet I got two or three people that I will pass on but I don't know that many people so well that's gonna be my next question is how do we find these people and if if

the answer is well it still says a nascent medium or like practice for writers to be YouTube script writers for creators I'm wondering if you have any thoughts around how to find somebody who you think could have the potential to learn this well hey real quick before they respond I want to let you know that there are bonus Audio Only episodes of Creator science that air every Tuesday when we don't publish a video episodes like number 156 where I talk with my editor Connor about our first year on YouTube or number 37 with Ollie abdall

if that's interesting just search for Creator science wherever you listen to podcasts alright back to the show one thing I've recommended in the past is getting somebody in as a researcher in the first place where they don't have yet the responsibilities of thinking critically in the way that we've been speaking about today about how the video is going to come together but they are thinking about the kind of information that will go into that sort of video and gradually if you uh keep them around for a certain length of time they will just naturally through

osmosis start to pick up a little more about how the videos come together in the end so that's it's almost like an apprenticeship I suppose you kind of got them in uh at an earlier level and you you let them learn as they go in terms of places to find I mean YouTube jobs.com is the only kind of Hub that I'm aware of other than Twitter but it is hard it is very hard and all I can say in terms of people that have asked about this for editors is that getting an Editor to share

opportunities on their Instagram story or something like that means you're more likely to get a swarm of the right kind of people uh coming to the call but it's it's hard for writers at the moment it is to try and find them we have an unfair advantage of as creators of having distribution or having an audience of people who already know our work it strikes me that it's probably helpful to look within your audience first for people that might be high potential because they'll already have some level of baked in knowledge of your voice and

familiarity with it of course if you're trying to do something new and kind of expand beyond what you're doing that might actually be a hindrance but if you're like you know what I want to keep doing what we're doing this is working we have kind of a a platform and a pattern then probably finding someone who's already familiar with their work is is helpful no you're right and actually I've got somebody who is helping me with my script writing course at the moment who is somebody that was reading my newsletter for uh you know six

months or so uh who is also a YouTube script writer as it turned out um and she's proven to be invaluable in all of this and all basically what she asked was like hey I'll I'll help you write this this thing um if you're happy for me to just keep it at the end essentially and keep learning from you along the way and that's something that's like super super useful and immediately that's someone who I'm more likely to want to pass on because I'm already getting a sense of of her capabilities so um yeah I

think you make a really good point what haven't we covered here in the process so far George I've got the four hat structure we've talked about writing this in a way that engages the viewer and adding some signposts along the way for moving towards a payoff what haven't we touched on here that you think is really important for somebody who's approaching writing their next video script the call to action is is a big one a thread of mine has kind of been doing the rounds again more more recently with the kind of the closest thing

to a hack I've ever found for YouTube and obviously carry out that with the fact there are none but there's just a little change in the way that I've started doing my uh call to actions at the end um and I'm talking specifically about trying to get somebody to watch another video that just blasts the channel average uh click through at the end way out the water like pretty much without fail and I've started getting people dming me now with their results using this this exact same thing this feels already exactly like the kind of

spam ad you get on uh like a dodgy website where it's like the edge of my seat I'm leaning in what a lot of people do is either they'll spend a lot of the time uh you know thanking the video for watching and all like you want to still be a pleasant human being that's all good I'm not saying we have to dispense with the pleasantries completely but the the sense we give and again this is something that Ed has talked about is that we want to give people the impression the video that there's more

to learn but the simple way that I found it breaking this down is a three-step thing so first link and I'm not talking about the URL to a video until looking a link back to something that you've been discussing in this video so that it could seem that you're naturalistically now just building on to another Point based on what you've already been talking about and what the viewer is already there watching the next thing is uh curiosity Gap so you're going to relate something you've already spoken about in this video you're going to open a

curiosity Gap based on that thing so the classic is like although you may have understood or you may have enjoyed learning about X you won't be able to properly apply it until you know why and then the final point is the call to action promise so the call to action being so watch this video so that and then you add the promise so that you can achieve whatever it is that they want to achieve so again you're trying to root the emotion in something that they're clearly already interested in because they've watched this video from

start to finish this obviously relies on you again picking a video to send them to that is going to be super super relevant but if you can make them feel like something they've watched in this video is incomplete you really widen that Curiosity Gap and get them desperate to know is you have to have to tell them so link curiosity Gap and then the promise slash call to action at the end so you and I were just talking about how to engage the viewer in the video and what you're sharing with them that's actually something

that we talked a lot about with Ed on the recent video that we had here so if you're watching this and you're interested in learning more about how to make your videos more interesting and to engage the viewer and storytelling you should watch this video where I interview Ed from filmbooth right here dude that was killer you're a you're a natural [Music] foreign