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Auguste Rodin's The Thinker
Okay, we know the stages our script will have to go through. But how do we come up with a concept for a script? Particularly, a concept for a PSA or ad.

Anthony Friedmann, in his Writing for Visual Media (2006), suggest his seven-step method of creative concept development. Chapter 4 is helpful, too, as it provides "case studies" of how concepts for PSAs (our first scriptwriting assignment) were developed. Here are Friedmann's tips:

1. We need to define the communication problem. That means deciding on the message we want to communicate. But that also entails knowing our target audience and our objectives. 

This basically means deciding on what we "need to show, tell, explain, attract, entertain, seduce, delight, or distract an audience" (Friedmann 49). Once we know what we need to do, and have an audience in mind, we can think of how that message would be successfully received by the audience. (Friedmann also warns us to make sure it's the communication problem, and not the social or marketing problem we're addressing.)
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2. We need to fit our message to our target audience. To do this, we need to determine the demographics and psychographics of our audience. Demographics refers to our target audience's general age, gender, race/ethnic origin, education, income, and other characteristics that may help us write our script. 

But aside from the audience's demographics, it is equally important that we determine their psychographics. Understanding the audience's psychographics means taking into consideration the attitudes and mental outlook of groups of people. This will involve looking into their emotions, attitudes (receptive, hostile, indifferent) towards the subject and medium, attention span, and the amount of information our primary audience are usually able to digest at a given time.

3. Aside from defining the communication problem or the "what for" and the target audience or the "for whom," we also need to determine what we want to achieve through our concept. We need to define our objective or "why" we want our audience to be affected by our concept. Why do we want them to be motivated to think or feel one way or another, or why do we want them to act one way or another. To test if we have our objective on target, we can try to describe in a statement the result we want to achieve with our script.

4. Once we know the result we want to achieve, we can define the strategy to employ. We can use humor, a story, create suspense, use shock, sow intrigue, insert unique footage, have testimonials, or present a case history. Whatever strategy we decide on, we want to make sure that it will yield the result that we really desired.

5. We then try to translate this message to achieve a specific result from our target audience, using a particular strategy, by describing the content we'll put into the script. By content we mean exactly what visual elements we'll write into the frames we want the director to shoot. The key words here are: visual elements.

6. Of course, we also have to fit the visual content we envision with the medium we plan to use. Some visual media, like TV or multimedia, have specific conventions that determine what content works best. Should we include a detailed table or graph of numerical figures in our visuals for a 60-second TV ad, or would that work better in a multimedia slideshow?

7. Once we've answered the questions raised from Step 1 to 6 (what communication need? for whom? why? how? what to include? which medium?), we can now start writing our concept. The concept may read like a script, but is usually written in prose paragraphs rather than the dual-column or master scene formats. It presents a visual blueprint of your answers to Steps 1 to 6. Not sure if your concept will work? Try pitching it to someone. If it gains some interest, perhaps you may have something there.
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