Video Scriptwriters Editing and Proofreading Services

The script is three pages of prose describing a product launch video. The editor reads it, guesses which sentences are meant to be spoken and which describe pictures, cuts to a shot the writer never imagined, and asks whether the second paragraph is voiceover or on-screen text. Two days of revisions follow, all of them about a formatting decision nobody made.

We edit scripts for commissioned and corporate video — two-column and AV scripts, voiceover and narration copy, on-screen text and lower-third copy, shot and visual descriptions written for an editor, explainer and training video scripts, subtitle and caption text, and the client-facing versions used for approval. Our editors work on documents that pass between a writer, a client and an editor.

The two-column script is the format the rest of the process depends on, and its failure is prose where a division belongs. Everybody downstream needs to know what is heard and what is seen. We work through these so audio and visual sit in separate columns aligned row by row, since an editor works from what is on screen at a given second and cannot derive that from a paragraph; so the audio column contains only what will be heard, with the speaker identified where there is more than one; so the visual column describes what the viewer sees rather than what it should feel like, because "dynamic montage conveying energy" gives an editor nothing to cut and "three shots, machine, hands, finished part, roughly one second each" does; so on-screen text is written exactly as it will appear, including capitalisation, given that it will be typed by somebody reading this cell; so the timing is estimated per row from the word count, as a script that runs to two minutes forty when the brief said ninety seconds is a rewrite nobody costed; so anything that must be filmed rather than sourced is marked, since this is where budget conversations start; so pronunciation of names and technical terms is given for the voice artist; and so the client approval version can hide the visual column without losing sense, because clients approve words and then discover pictures. Scripts written this way survive the edit.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including scripts, client briefs and unreleased material. We are editors rather than directors, producers or editors of film, and we offer no view on production, budget or creative direction. What we can do is separate what is heard from what is seen.