Writing for a Visual Medium

As a writer, I'm having a horrible time understanding the order in which you do things while videotaping and writing a television story. You start with the focus of course, then have an outline of the main points. But it's not like writing an article. You only get one shot to film. If it's an event, you better get every shot you need in order to be able to put a story package together, because you just can't drag your camera back to the scene and get everybody in the same clothes again if you forgot something. Whereas with writing, yes it helps to get everything you will need to write the story then and there, but you can always call back or google something if it doesn't make sense. I guess I'm just having troubling seeing how you set up a television story without even having done the reporting at the event. I guess camera people really have to think on their feet and be quick to get everything they could possibly need at the shoot, then go put together a story based on what they got.

My neurotic anxieties out of the way, writing for a visual medium seems to need a couple of things. The most important is to be able to summarize the point of the story in one sentence. People's attention spans are not long. They want to know what they are seeing and why. The second most important thing is to tell a story. Tell them what they are seeing and why it's relevant, but them them get the emotions from the footage themselves.