- George Blackman, a YouTube script writer, emphasizes the importance of scripting in video making.
- The framing of the video idea is crucial to engage the audience and keep them interested.
- Mini payoffs throughout the video serve as building blocks to the ultimate payoff.
- Signposting and planning for when and how the payoffs happen is necessary.
- While some improvisation is acceptable, having a mapped out plan provides creative control and ensures coherence.
- Uscreen is a platform that helps content creators earn a living from their videos through memberships.

- Drafting up an audience avatar is important for being laser-focused in content creation and marketing.
- An audience avatar can be created for the entire channel or for specific videos targeting a different audience.
- The 4 hat structure for writing scripts includes the artist (free-flowing ideas), the architect (structuring the content), the writer (connecting the dots and adding progression), and the wizard (focusing on retention and payoffs).
- Efficiency in scriptwriting doesn't always lead to effective learning and retention.
- Giving payoffs too early and then padding the runtime with unnecessary explanations can undermine the audience's engagement and make them feel less smart.
- Using metaphors and interesting routes to the main point can enhance the audience's understanding and retention.

- The speaker suggests using metaphors or interesting routes to engage the audience before making a point.
- They give an example of a boxing video where the audience is asked to guess a technique before it is revealed.
- The speaker believes that hiring a script writer can greatly benefit channels, but it is not as common as hiring editors or thumbnail designers.
- They recommend finding potential script writers within the audience or starting with a researcher role.
- The speaker discusses the importance of a strong call to action in videos.
- They suggest using a three-step approach for the call to action: linking back to something discussed in the video, opening a curiosity gap, and providing a call to action and promise.

- The call to action is to watch the video to achieve their desired goal
- Emotion should be rooted in something they are already interested in
- The chosen video should be highly relevant
- Creating a curiosity gap will make them desperate to know more
- The video should engage the viewer and use storytelling techniques

- George Blackman, a YouTube script writer, emphasizes the importance of scripting in video making.
- Framing the video idea is crucial for audience engagement.
- Mini payoffs throughout the video build up to the ultimate payoff.
- Signposting and planning for payoffs is necessary.
- Improvisation is acceptable, but a mapped out plan ensures coherence.
- Uscreen helps content creators earn from videos through memberships.
- Audience avatars are important for focused content creation and marketing.
- The 4 hat structure for scripts includes artist, architect, writer, and wizard.
- Efficiency in scriptwriting doesn't always lead to effective learning.
- Early payoffs followed by unnecessary explanations undermine engagement.
- Metaphors and interesting routes enhance understanding and retention.
- Hiring a script writer is beneficial but less common than hiring editors or designers.
- A strong call to action is important in videos.
- A three-step approach for the call to action is suggested.
- Emotion should be rooted in viewer's interests.
- The chosen video should be highly relevant and engage through storytelling.

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***

George Blackman is a YouTube scriptwriter who’s been hired by YouTubers like Ali Abdaal, Mike Shake, and Ed from Film Booth to write videos for them.

Scripting is one of THE most important parts of the video-making process that you may be overlooking – and George says it can make or break your video.

So in this episode, you’ll learn

•How a great video starts
•The 4-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

💙 Script Templates from George: https://georgeblackman.notion.site/Templates-33c31bbd6d8c4ed1b7707876f6e4adb6
🌐 Episode page: https://podcast.creatorscience.com/george-blackman/
📬 Newsletter: https://creatorscience.com
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TIMESTAMPS
00:00 - The Secret Scriptwriter Getting Millions of Views
01:20 - How to Start a Video
05:08 - The Biggest Writing Mistake YouTubers Make
06:37 - Get Full Creative Control of Your Videos
08:38 - Our Lovely Sponsor :) 
09:43 - Do This Before You Start Writing
12:02 - 4-Step Process to Writing the Perfect Script
16:42 - How to Write to Engage the Audience
22:30 - Why You Should Hire a Scriptwriter
24:33 - Where to Find a YouTube Scriptwriter
27:36 - Crafting the Perfect Call to Action

***

CONNECT WITH GEORGE
🌐 Website: https://georgeblackman.com/
🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/GeorgeBlackman_
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TEAM
Host + Producer // Jay Clouse: https://jayclouse.com/links
Editor // Conor Conaboy: https://twitter.com/conorconaboy
Audio Engineer // Nathan Todhunter: https://www.nathantodhunter.com/
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Creator Science is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network.

Essentially, the audience needs to know pretty much at all times what it is they're waiting around for next.

That's what we're waiting around for, but not losing sight of the fact that you need to have these mini payoffs kind of throughout the video that serve as building blocks to that ultimate thing.

That's George Blackman, a YouTube script writer who's been hired by YouTubers like Ali Abdaal, Mike Shaikh, and Ed from Filmbooth to write videos for them, like the 1 you just saw.

Scripting is 1 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 need to know what all the beats are that you're gonna 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 think, 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 4 hat writing process to make better videos, tips for finding and hiring a script writer, and How to craft the perfect call to action to end your videos.

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 1 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 the idea generation.

My role tends to come in as like, how do we, once we've got that idea, how do we frame it?

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 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 one-to-one calls that I do with creators is that your first idea is often not going to be the best, the best 1.

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 kind of incessant rebooting of basically everything we know and love from our childhood.

And they came to me saying like, I wanna talk about this.

And, but they weren't fully sure like how to approach it.

And their first instinct was like, well, why don't we just talk about the pros and the cons of doing Hollywood reboots?

Like, yeah, well, it's good, well, it's bad, which is like, cool, 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.

And if you're going to try and delay revealing that answer to your audience for 10, 15, 20 minutes, or like 4 hours, if it's a video essay, potentially, that's not something that is going to convince me to be able 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 movies that I'm not gonna enjoy seeing this.

But why is it that I keep giving Hollywood my money?

To be honest with that question easily, it makes them money.

So it's almost like an invasive look into my own behavior.

The sort of thing I think, 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 basically the kind of the checklist that you want for how you frame your video.

It's gotta be something that's interesting for you, it's gotta be something that's deeply interesting for your audience, it's gotta evoke some kind of emotion, like the kind of emotional response I was having just then, the like kind of frustration or whatever it is, and then it's got to open multiple curiosity gaps.

It's gotta 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 is paramount

Well, I think I'm hearing and tell me if I'm hearing this incorrectly.

Yeah, but 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.

That's the succinct answer for what I just said.

So what are some of the trends you see as to what that behavior is or what mistakes people are making early on and throughout the beginning portion of video that causes people to lose interest in TuneOut?

It usually comes down to the idea of payoff, as its 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 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 breakdown of how Thomas Frank makes however many hundreds of thousands of dollars he makes a month.

But in the kind of you know, the 7, 8 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 in the newsletter that I've written that's going out today is about identifying that grand payoff, but not losing sight of the fact that you need to have these mini 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 girl my time for the next minute?

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.

It seems like I'm probably not going to walk in, hit record and just do these things really well.

Yeah, this is actually funnily enough, earlier this this week or last week, maybe I did Justin's Creator Debates podcast and we were talking 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 script writer 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.

You wanna have it mapped out as much as you possibly can.

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 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.

Have I properly 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 call out the fact that you don't have to have the entire process dialed to attend and 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 windshield, I guess it's not your rear view mirror.

You can have that in front of you and know 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.

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So We have an idea that hits those checkboxes 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 going to feel like 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 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 idea of an audience avatar, are you suggesting that that's something I do for my channel and each video is addressing that audience?

Or are you saying each video we need to create this avatar?

I mean, 1 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 cohort 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 in a moment, But it's certainly an option you have, but you should definitely have 1 for your channel as a whole, yeah.

And when you're doing this, what level of depth are you thinking?

Are you talking about their demographic information?

I've, well, when I worked with Ali, I saw for a course that he was launching, somebody was doing the whole like, they have a name, they have an exact occupation, like all of that stuff.

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 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 to me feels like 1 step beyond what I need to do.

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 in terms of the ideas that you're getting down on the page.

And this is the kind of process that I follow when I'm writing basically any script.

And the first hat is what I call the artist, 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 1 thing is gonna 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 that we're gonna 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.

Would they wear a hard hat when walking around?

The architect, the constructor, however you like to phrase it.

And that is where you start to flesh out that structure.

And that's where from all these ideas that you've got, you start to eliminate the ones that you realize aren't gonna be super interesting.

And you figure out 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 gonna 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 mind.

So getting that structure dialed in is part 2.

I don't know what kind of hat a writer wears.

I maybe 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 gonna hit.

Now you're connecting the dots, essentially.

There 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 1 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, the person who's in it doing the thing, or if it's something educational, what is the goal of the person watching?

So again, entertainment video, what does it look like?

What is it they do that is bad and takes them away from the goal, sees them regress away from the goal?

Or again, if it's the viewer we're talking about in an educational video, it's what are the kind of 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 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 kind of half form B roll ideas and visual cues and things that you might wanna 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 wizard's 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's literally going through the video and highlighting every time I think there is a moment where the audience is gonna 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 swathes 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 very utilitarian, especially in the first draft.

It's like, all right, I want to explain this thing to you.

And if I'm not careful, I end up with like a 2 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 hat, 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 wanna understand more about how this looks when you're actually digging in and writing the script.

Yes, I really like what you said there about 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, I think I was reviewing 1 of their scripts, and I actually saw in their notes, they had this kind of thing in bold, starred text.

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 2 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 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 run time, 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 answer, why would I keep talking about it?

But you see it all the time, Like listicles are a real bandit for this, where you're like, okay, 10 things that I can't go without when I leave the house.

And immediately, I'm watching that thinking, well, I know why your house keys, because you need to get back in the house.

But then with this sort of list score, 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 get it, I got it.

Again, not making the audience feel smart.

You give that payoff a little later, and this is, again, I know you spoke with Ed about this, and this is his real kind of 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 gonna talk about.

So he's like the king of YouTube metaphors, right?

And that was something that was really fun when I was working with him.

It was getting to 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 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.

This reminds me of a video we did on the channel about my revenue streams from last year.

And it's like, here are the revenue streams that I put in place.

Those videos a lot of people watching that are probably like, just tell me the 7 things.

And I felt I felt like I needed to have context in between, but it was a struggle for like what you're saying context that is additive and useful versus me just trying to pad the runtime.

This is why I hate reading any article that's written for SEO because they're all this way.

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, it's having a high level conversation without having to dumb it down much and assuming that people will keep up with it.

In fact, I had the boxer who was training Michelle Khare in that recent video she did.

And if you've seen this incredible video that she made a couple of months ago, I think it was the bronze British Olympic boxer from 2008 or whatever, was the guy who was training her in that video.

And he actually came to me for a video review, which I put in my newsletter.

And I think this is 1 of the most simple examples of showing how you can easily switch these things over, is he was doing a video about like boxing techniques.

If you're a short person fighting a taller person and every time he would be like, the technique is this, I'm going to move much closer very quickly.

And that means I can get a punch in before they even see me.

And my suggestion to him was like, how simple is this?

Like 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?

Immediately they're now watching it thinking, oh, I think I can, 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.

And that's just a way more satisfying experience for the viewer.

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 a really good way of thinking about it.

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Meet the Secret Scriptwriter Getting YouTubers Millions of Views