Ryerson campus recently added a new installation honouring Dish With One Spoon Territory. Julia Tramontin reports from campus.

Writing for broadcast has a different writing style than writing for print. Unlike with print, broadcast writing connects sound, images, and voice to tell a visual story. Writing a script for broadcast uses a specific format that combines the timing, visuals, and scrpit or interviews to clearly show what the piece will be like. This week, I created two scripts, one based of off a video and one based on a story I wrote, to test out the techniques of broadcast script writing.

Below is an example of what a news story would look like in script form. Based on a CTV News story about mental health during the pandemic, I recreated the script to see how the actual news piece translates to script form. You’ll notice that this includes the timing, what type of visuals are included (such as b-roll or images), and what type of script (a voiceover or interview clip). Take a look.

Throughout the video, there is a wide range of visuals that helps get the story across. This includes about 20 b-roll shots, four interview clips, two data visualizations, and one shot of the reporter doing an interview at the end of the video. This creates an effective broadcast script by weaving a variety of visuals and audio together to create a piece that is informative and easy to watch. While the b-roll shots, such as the children jumping on the trampoline, creates a sense of real-life that viewers can relate to, the data visualizations give statistics that are easy to look at are therefore easier for viewers to absorb. Adding in interview clips provides context and expert opinion. Then one of the final shots of the reporter interviewing Renee Gan shows viewers the process of how the reporter put together the video. Writing the script for the video allowed me to break down the video into separate components and see how they fit together to create a visual story. With the variety of images and types of audio, viewers see different angles of the story in a way that can easily be absorbed. Unlike in a print piece, this news broadcast comes across as clear and conversational to make it accessible to viewers. In the script above, you can see it is not overloaded with big words and lots of information but is casual and informative which makes the overall piece more effective.

Below is an example of what writing a script based on a written article looks like. To complete this, I used the second news story I wrote for my journalism class and wrote a broadcast script based on what I imagine the story to look like in broadcast form. This includes voiceovers, b-roll, interview clips, and images. I used my story to decide what the most important facts are, which interview clips I should use, and what appropriate visuals would be. Because writing for broadcast is different than in print, I tried to keep my script clear and conversational, and include visuals that relate to what is being talked about. You can check out my story here and see below for the script.

Writing a script and deciding what visuals to use was exciting and I enjoyed having creative control over what the broadcast would look like. However, writing for broadcast based on a written story provided its own challenges. With a tight time limit in broadcast news stories, deciding what facts need to be included and what needs to be cut in order to fit the space provided was a challenge, as I did not want to leave out any important facts. In addition, rewording my work to be clear and conversational for broadcast was also an obstacle because I had to edit my writing in the story without leaving out the key details. While writing my script, I paid specific attention to the visuals in order to make sure that what is visually seen relates to what the audio being played over it is. Writing a script based off of the CTV News story first was really helpful. As this is my first time writing a script, transferring the video into script form made me more aware of how all the components of visual storytelling work together.