I’m out of practice.
This afternoon, I revised the script for the SciCast Awards event on Monday. It’s a relatively simple affair, very much a case of setting up a routine and banging through it twelve times, once for each award. The routine goes:
- Introduce the award category.
- Introduce the guest who’s to present that award.
- Guest says a few words, cues a clipsreel of the nominees.
- Clipsreel plays.
- Guest opens envelope, announces winner.
- Cue their film, while they make their way to the front.
- Film finishes; hand over trophy, handshake & photos, little interview, etc.
- Reset and do it all again with the next category.
Simple. Yet I still managed to mess up stage two.
If you’re introducing someone, you want to end on a clear cue to them, and an implicit call for applause from the audience. Consider, then, the difference between:
- “…to present the award, Jem Stansfield, engineer and television presenter.”
and - “…to present the award, engineer and television presenter, Jem Stansfield.”
The latter is clearly better. Every time.
I know this. I worked this sort of thing out long ago. I know about inflection, and continuation thoughts, and all that. Why, then, did I use both forms in this script?
Because I’m rusty. I haven’t written ‘proper’ scripts for a while. I haven’t had the discipline of hearing my words performed by professional presenters, of hearing them again and again and again in the edit suite. I’m going soft.
I should blog more. Hard to believe from the meandering nonsense here, but it helps me keep an edge.
Really, though, I should write a script again.
Ouch.
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