Notes from a Workshop

I've been working on a voiceover script for a 90 second video since July. Obviously, I haven't been working on it that entire time because that would be insane and no one except my boss is that inefficient at anything. But after months of trying to get draft after draft after draft approved, we took the thing to a recording studio and laid down the VO.

Then the head of Marketing decided he didn't like it so we spent another month re-writing it.

So we recorded THAT script. And we listened to it. Re-recorded parts. Edited the copy. Tweaked lines to make it easier to pronounce. Forced the engineer to stay late even though his buddy was downstairs waiting on a ride to band practice. But finally, after a couple hours of wrangling, we got the nod from our head of Marketing: it was done. It was approved. Send it out to the visual effects people to create the video.

The next day I had an email with notes on the script. From the head of Marketing. He had some changes for the thing that, just 18 hours ago, he'd said was done and sent out the door to a vendor. Worse, he didn't just want me to incorporate his notes. He wanted me to workshop it with my boss, who up until now had not been involved in the process in any way.

These are my notes, written as close to verbatim as I could manage, from that meeting:

• "Who is this geared towards?" (we're only, what, four months into this project?)
• "What is the job title of the person watching?"
• "We need the opportunity and challenge."
• Idle mumbling/reading the script out loud over and over.
• "I wish I'd seen a previous version of this."
• "So we're helping the client solve a complicated and frustrating process. Hey that's sort of like the problems we have!"
• "We should have some illustrations." (we're workshopping voiceover copy)
• More reading of the script out loud.
• "Do you want to make this a 60 second spot instead?"
• "Okay we need three top points. I don't know what they are but we should come up with three."
• Approximately three minutes spent staring silently at the projection of a Word doc.
• Some typing
• More mumbling.
• "Sorry I'm still reading." THIS IS 45 MINUTES INTO THE MEETING. No actual copy suggestions so far.
• More mumbling. He's obviously stalling because he doesn't even know what the product is that this video describes.
• I silently remind myself that my job description is, essentially, to come in and have my time wasted.
• "You don't read the first sentence as two sentences." I have no idea what this means.
• "I would put a period there instead of a comma." Again, this is a script to be read aloud.
• "It's a big sentence but when I read it, it sounds slower." What?
• "Definitely need features and benefits."
• "I started walking up and down the stairs a couple of times a day Really helps me think." I sit right outside his office. I know for a fact he does not do this.
• "Do you have the same version of MS Word as me? Yours looks newer."
• "So definitely put this into a script form." It is a script. I do not know how to make it more script-y.
• At this point he goes off on a six minute (I timed it) diatribe about the use of various fonts.
• "Start with something short and simple."
• "Think about what we can NOT say and leave to the visual part."
• "You'll need to call [colleague] for more information. Just pick up the phone and give her a ring. If she won't talk on the phone, or if she doesn't have time to talk, try sending her an email."
• "Honestly I don't even know what's important and what's not for this project."
• "Let's figure out the benefit, then say it." The benefit, that the product saves time and work, is the opening sentence.
• "I just want people to watch this video and think to themselves, boy [my name] is one smart guy!" This is a commercial going out to executives and managers at ad agencies all over America. None of them know or care about the faceless copywriter behind it.
• "What is the problem we're solving again?"
• "Find a way to say that this has all the features and benefits you need, and none of the ones you don't."
• More muttering as he reads the script (it's a page and a half) back to me again.
• "Try to think about putting this into sections."
• "Focus on how we save them...what do we save them? Time? Or was it work?" 
• "If we make them more efficient, does that help their job satisfaction? Can we say that?"
• "Is there a benefit we can help them...do?"
• "Efficiency, yeah. That's good. Put some examples of efficiency in there." I would be hard-pressed to even identify efficiency in a business at this point.

The meeting concluded with a slap on the back and the confident assurances that he had just helped me tremendously. I am just turning in the same edited script the head of Marketing sent over already.