I thought my first draft of the narrator’s script for The Earl and the Leviathan was great. It covered everything I wanted to say without getting stuck in any boring ratholes.
I spent much of the past week building and scripting the images, animations, and tour motions to fit with the narrator’s script – and found that there were long periods with nothing going on except for the audio track. Dull!
Well, I suppose that depends on the narrator. Radio is all audio, after all, and many people like listening to the radio (not to mention audio books and podcasts).
The thing is, when people go on a tour, I think there’s a certain expectation that things will keep moving along, both audibly and visually.
Today I realized that the tour narrator doesn’t have to say everything I want to say; I can put a more detail on a notecard or web page!
So I wrote a whole new script for the narrator (which includes notes about what’s going on visually). It’s much shorter – maybe half as long as my original script – but I’m happy with it because it explains the two monster telescopes well. At the end of the tour, I’ll have a sign people can click for more information, including hyperlinks.
Photo Credits: zenith (radio) by liz_noise on Flickr is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License.