Writing for video

One of the things I learned in the Platypus Workshop this week is that the camera writes better than pen. Dirck Halstead noted that the sequence for selecting story-tellers in a visual medium should be: 1. video camera, 2. microphone, 3. editing room, 4. pen. It should come as no surprise that pictures speak louder than words. Good stories very much tell themselves before anything should be written down. That said. There are situations when good videos are not available---most commonly happening to people like me who have just begun to shoot videos----and there are times when deadline pushes people to take shortcut of doing more narration than video. In these cases, narrations are hole-fillers of the story, and it is necessary to render them in a clear, easy ways, (the MOM priciple). In most cases, I think writing for visual media should be brief and straight-forward. It should be able to cut between the scences and make fluid transitions between shots.