Effective Screenwriting for Educational Television

Context:
In this article the author suggests a structure for writing television programs that might also be useful for those writing programs for other media.

Source:
Koumi, J. 1992. "Effective Screenwriting for Educational Television." In B. Scriven, R. Lundin, and Y. Ryan, eds., Distance Education for the 21st Century. Papers of the 16th ICDE World Conference. Queensland University of Technology, pp. 90–95.

Copyright:
Reprinted by permission of the publishers.

Introduction

The question of the effectiveness of television as a medium of education has been frequently discussed, but most often from the point of view of completed programs. Surveys of the research such as Bates (1988) and Greenfield (1984) amply demonstrate the power of television as a learning medium but also reveal various limitations depending on its intended usage. However, the reported research studies rarely suggest explicit, practicable design features that could make television a more effective educational medium.

My colleagues and I were thereby forced to sit back and deliberate on the unwritten principles underlying our intuitively constructed programs. The original skeleton in 1982 of our collective ideas on screenwriting has now undergone five or six major revisions, culminating in Table 1, which summarises the issues which must be considered in screenwriting. (A case study including video and additional analysis of a single TV program in the UK Open University Biology Brain and Behaviour is available from the author.)

Table 1

Narrative Screenwriting for Educational TV

A. THREE USAGE DIMENSIONS
HOW IS THE PROGRAM TO BE USED
by whom, in what context, for what purpose

1. TARGET AUDIENCE

a. Culture
b. Age
c. Commitment: general/student body
d. Previous experience/knowledge
e. Facilities, e.g., owns/shares a TV?

2. LEARNING CONTEXT AND COMPLEMENTARY LEARNING

a. Other media: e.g., class teacher, other TV audio, print, other students, computer
b. Pre-work, post-work
c. TV vs. stop-work-start video

3. EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES

a. Affective (feelings, appreciations), e.g., reassure, fascinate, personalise
b. Motivational (urges), e.g., mobilise, stimulate diligence
c. Experiential, e.g., concretise, explore, demonstrate
d. Cognitive, e.g., knowledge, concepts, strategies

B. STRUCTURE
each Chapter of the Story

Make them want to know

1. Hook (but no false promises)

a. Appetise/create suspense
b. Surprise/excite/dramatise

Tell them what you will do

2. Signpost

a. Set the scene/introduce
b. Distant signpost, what's coming?
c. Chapter heading, what's next?
d. Focus: what to look out for

Do it with sympathy

3. Texture the story

a. Non-linear/non-sequential
b. Vary format
c. Vary mood/gravity
d. Structural Pacing

4. Reinforce

a. Repetition
b. Re-exemplify
c. Compare/contrast
d. Dramatic climax

5. Sensitise

a. Seeding
b. Consistent style
c. Music style/occurrence by design
d. Signal change of mood/topic

Tell them what you have done

6. Consolidate/Conclude

a. Recapitulate
b. Summarise salient features
c. Generalise/extrapolate
d. Chapter ending

Connect it

7. Link (make story hang together)

a. Content-link between items
b. Story-link/hand-over/pick-up

C. SYMPATHETIC PICTURE-WORD Composition

1. PRODUCER INTO VIEWR'S MIND:
What is the viewer thinking/looking at?

Reinforcing

a.

Words <--> pictures

2. PRODUCER OUT OF VIEWER'S MIND:
Don't blinker/allow mental elbow room

MINDFUL learning
by a RANGE OF viewers

a. Words NOT DUPLICATING pictures
b. Pause for contemplation
c. Pose questions
d. Don't mesmerise
e. Reveal geography
f. Reveal concept-environment
g. Professional integrity

Table 1—Area B: Structure

The purpose of Structuring is to construct: a rounded, sympathetic, educational story in which the viewers know exactly where they are, and what to derive from each chapter/topic. The construct should ensure that viewers are optimally receptive for the particular character of the topic.

The first structuring item I want to consider comes under section B3 of Table 1, Texture. The purpose of Texturing is to make the educational story more digestible, rather than it being a monotonous, single-track exposition.

One of the Texturing techniques, Structural Pacing, concerns how to vary the pace of the program in order to illuminate its semantic structure, for example, through pauses in the narration.

A long pause in narration allows viewers to finish assimilating a topic and to recognize that the topic has ended.

A continuation of topic may be signalled by yet another variability in the pacing: a brief pause in narration followed by a long (say 3 seconds) pause to indicate that the subject has not changed. The viewer recognises that time is being allowed for visual contemplation of this further illustration of the topic. This is illustrated in Table 2.

Incidentally, the appropriate duration of pauses in narration depends critically on how 'busy' the pictures are. For example, a three second pause may feel like only one second if there's a lot of movement in the picture (necessitating a lot of visual processing by the viewer). There are many such exceptions to the above structural pacing 'rules'.

Table 3 is an extract of a script from 'Dominance and Subordinacy', a program in the subject Biology Brain and Behaviour.

Shots 10 to 14 illustrate a combination of two techniques: Repetition and Comparison (both come under section B4 of Table 1, Reinforce).

When comparing two items, A and B, it is inadequate to show them only once each (A-B), because while the viewer is studying B, the memory of A is fading. So the minimum necessary is to repeat A, i.e. to show A-B-A, and better: A-B-A-B. In shots 10 to 14 the items being compared were Human and Animal faces: and the sequence was H-A-A-H-A.

Incidentally, shot 13, the human face which 'aped' the ape, was meant to surprise/ dramatise, and thereby to hook the viewer (B I in Table 1).

Table 1—Area A: Usage

In the same vein, the commentary just prior to the human face: 'The monkeys and the apes are our closest relatives', was purely to fascinate the viewer (section A3a of 'Fable 1). That is, the sentence is not actually needed for the academic content of the story: it's purely a narrative device to captivate the viewer.

Turning to section A 1, the Target Audience Characteristics must be taken into full account in the design of the program. In the present example, the target audience, 2nd level OU undergraduates, have completed a Science Foundation Course, so many technical terms are used without interpretation. However, since the program was broadcast nationwide, Open University students are not the only viewers; a secondary target audience is the general British public, therefore some account has to be taken of their tastes, sensitivities and language level.

Table 1—Area C: Picture-word Composition

Following the first mention of sexual activity, the question of maternal care is introduced, and the way this is done illustrates item C2a of Table I; Words NOT DUPLICATING Pictures.

A shot in the 'Dominance' program which illustrates this technique, in which the words are telling a parallel story rather than describing the pictures literally, is as follows.

The shot shows a Rhesus monkey mother suckling her baby while simultaneously grooming an older offspring. The narration says: 'individual animals care for their young, and they may do so for several years'.

If the narration had been a literal description, It would have said: 'individual mothers suckle their babies and groom their older offspring', which is much less informative and does not encourage viewers to contribute their own interpretation to the pictures and words. This is the point for all the items in section C2: to encourage active, mindful viewing, rather than passive reception.

Let me say something about the whole of Area C. Area C involves some principles of picture-word composition that do not fall under Area B, Structure. The C principles could be termed 'supra-structural'.

As shown in Table 1, Area C has two apparently contradictory precepts:

• the producer should get into the viewer's mind, and
• the producer should get out of the viewer's mind.

However, there is no actual contradiction. Both precepts arc sympathetic, in the sense that in the first, the producer has to 'feel with' the viewers, trying to predict what they are thinking and looking at on the screen, whereas in the second, the producer has to 'feel for' the viewers its thinking human beings who must not be totally 'led by the nose' but who should be given opportunities for independent thought. These opportunities have two purposes:

• to encourage active/mindful viewing, and hence to stimulate analytic viewing as opposed to 'mesmeric immersion'
• to cater, in parallel, for individual differences.

Returning to Area C1, the largest of its five subheadings, about which a whole book could be written, is C I a: words should reinforce pictures and vice-versa, to maximum effect.

An implication of this is that a subject specialist should not try to write the words of a TV program without thinking of the pictures, and then expect a TV producer to find the most effective pictures. That's because the most effective pictures for the topic might necessitate considerable changes in the proposed words.

The reverse also applies: thinking of a sequence of pictures first and hoping that effective words can be composed as an afterthought is unlikely to be totally successful.

What is required is an iterative process of picture-word composition whereby one draft of the words leads to a draft of the pictures, which in turn leads to a second draft of the words, and so on. Even more sophisticated, and sometimes achievable, is for words and pictures to be thought of together, as an integrated whole, at each successive drafting. In either case, the final draft should achieve maximum synergy of words and pictures.

The utmost opportunity for the full implementation of this philosophy occurs in the production of animation. Here the producer/screenwriter has total control of the design of the pictures as well as of the words (subject to financial constraints). Therefore, words and pictures can he meticulously planned to synchronise and reinforce each other maximally.

It is difficult, in print alone, to describe a specific animation adequately so as to illustrate the above picture-word synergy. However, a valuable related question can be addressed at the opposite extreme. When the pictures are unpredictable location recordings, how can the words be composed so that pictures and words reinforce each other maximally?

Analysis of quality materials suggests that decisions on the precise wording of the commentary have to be made after the video recording. A video sequence will suggest a particular narative.

Revisiting Area B: Structuring

I'll conclude with some fairly simple but important ideas of Structuring.

Some way through the program examined here, there's a transition in the story, signalled by the narration: 'Now that we've defined dominance, let's consider: how do we measure it?'.

The first half of the sentence, 'Now that we've defined dominance . . .', is an example of a type of Consolidation / Conclusion called a Chapter Ending (section B6 of Table 1).

The educational objective of such a Chapter Ending is that the viewer mentally 'closes the book' on the chapter or topic (and knows which book has been closed, because it has been named). The topic has thus been labelled and 'filed away' in the viewer's mind, which is now 'cleared' to receive the next topic.

The other three types of Consolidation listed in Table 9 (section B6) are more substantial, extending back into the 'Chapter' to recapitulate or summarise, or even extending outside the Chapter to generalise.

The second half of the sentence, '... let's consider: how do we measure it?', is an example of a type of signpost called a Chapter Heading (section B2 of Table 1).

The educational objective of such a Chapter Heading is that the viewer 'opens a mental channel' to receive the next item and labels the channel with the name of the subject matter. This also connects the channel with anything the viewer already knows about the subject, in which case the new ideas are assimilated into the existing mental framework.

A Chapter Heading is one of four distinct kinds of Signpost listed in section B2. Another, more global kind of signpost is to Set the Scene or Introduce.