Clients often ask us “how do you know how many words to write and how do you time the script?”. We can safely say that after years of experience, the last thing we want is for our audience to face “listening fatigue” from either a fast or slowly read script. So between a comfortable narration and a fast commercial voice over, timing a script is key. Here’s the right way we’ve been doing it.

Come prepared

After perfecting our written script, we time it to make sure the words don’t exceed the requested duration of the video. We have it ready with a stopwatch and a bit of practice on the punctuation as well as the tone of voice. It is also important for us to never use the generic online script timing programs as they are barely accurate and just take into account the number of words and instead of the desired narrator rhythm.

Common script timing mistakes

A couple of notions we learned along the way:

• To never read in our head and time it, as it leads to unrealistic and inaccurate results.
• We don’t rely on the total number of words or pages.
• Reading like we normally speak in everyday conversations is a big no-no too.

How we do it

When we start the stopwatch we make sure to wait a couple of seconds before reading to allow the final video time to fade in, and after reading to close the video. And we make sure to read calmly, articulate, and follow the punctuation as it is written. Et voilà!

Finally, it wouldn’t be a wezank blog post without a signature explainer video. Enjoy watching and get in touch if you want to discover more tricks of the trade.