Sunday, December 11, 2005

Incredibly Hard*

One of my little projects at work is a video production telling the story of our product. I got a script approved by management last week, hitting all of the important points that they wanted to discuss in the video. When the narrator read it for me last week, it ran 12:48.
Friday, a final decision was made that we needed a short version, around 5:00 long.
I'm supposed to be in the studio with the editor on Monday. I spent most of Saturday trying to pare down the script, with very little flexibility in what I could do, since the script is already recorded. The narration runs about 2 words per second, so I've basically had to take a 1500 word piece down to 600, without losing the meaningful bits.

The old saw about writing short pieces being harder than writing long pieces is absolutely true.


*I wonder what kind of search engine hits this will generate?