Most video scripts describe what happened. The ones that go viral recreate what it felt like to be there.
Source: This breakdown comes from Philipp Humm's "Give me 9min, and I'll improve your storytelling skills by 176%", which dissects John Krasinski's famous customs story to extract five repeatable storytelling techniques.
John Krasinski told a story on a talk show about going through customs after marrying Emily Blunt. He could have summarized it in one sentence: "The customs agent couldn't believe I married Emily Blunt." That would have communicated the same information. But it wouldn't have gone viral, and it wouldn't have made the audience laugh until they couldn't breathe.
What Krasinski did instead was reconstruct the moment beat by beat, putting the audience inside the customs booth with him. He didn't say "the agent was surprised." He recreated the dialogue: "And then I said yeah, and he said who are you visiting here, I said my wife, and he says is she an actress, and I go yeah, and he goes who, and I said Emily Blunt, and he goes... you married Emily Blunt?"
The difference between those two versions is the difference between describing a story and performing one. Humm breaks this down into five specific techniques that anyone can learn and, more importantly, that content teams can use as a scoring rubric before a single frame gets filmed.
Ground-Level Stories Spread, Helicopter-Level Summaries Don't
Most stories stay at what Humm calls "helicopter level." You're hovering above the events, summarizing what happened from a safe altitude. "I went to customs. The agent recognized my wife. He was surprised." The listener gets the plot, but they don't get the experience.
The stories that spread are the ones that take you to ground level. You're standing in the customs line. You can hear the agent's voice. You know what the person was thinking in that exact moment. The story doesn't move at the speed of summary. It moves at the speed of experience.
This is the fundamental shift, and every one of the five techniques is a tool for making it happen. They force the storyteller out of helicopter mode and into the trenches where the audience can feel what it was like to actually be there.
A Single Location Anchor Grounds Your Audience in Seconds
Every story needs a stage before it needs actors.
When Krasinski starts the customs story, he puts you in a specific place. Not a vague "so this one time" opening, but a physical location the audience can see in their minds. Humm's broader point is that location doesn't need elaborate description. "Two weeks ago I'm sitting on my couch in my living room" is enough. "I was at the customs desk at LAX" is enough. As long as the audience can visualize where they are, the details are secondary.
The mistake most creators make is either skipping location entirely (jumping straight into what happened) or over-describing it (three sentences about the airport terminal when one would do). The goal is a single, grounding image. Couch. Kitchen. Customs desk. The audience's imagination fills in everything else.
For video scripts, this translates directly: open scenes with a location anchor. "Last Tuesday I was in our studio reviewing footage" gives the viewer a mental stage. "I had an interesting experience" gives them nothing to hold onto. The location doesn't need to be exotic. It needs to be specific enough that the audience can place themselves somewhere.
Action Verbs Create Motion, State Verbs Create Summaries
Verbs carry stories forward. Nouns sit still.
"I walked up to the counter and handed him my passport" creates motion. "I was at the counter" is static. The difference is small on paper and massive in how the audience experiences the story. Actions create a sense of time passing in real time rather than in summary.
Humm points out that the simplest actions work: walking, waiting, sitting, looking, reaching. You don't need dramatic physical feats. You need movement that puts the audience inside a body doing something, rather than a narrator recounting something.
This is one of the easiest techniques to audit in a script. Read through and highlight every verb. If the verbs are mostly "was," "had," "felt," and "seemed," the script is in summary mode. If the verbs are "walked," "grabbed," "looked," "paused," and "leaned," the script is in action mode. Action mode holds attention because the audience is tracking physical movement, and tracking movement is something the human brain does automatically and willingly.
For content teams, this is a quick script health check. Circle the verbs. Count how many are action verbs versus state verbs. A ratio skewed heavily toward state verbs usually means the script needs a rewrite at the scene level.
Raw Internal Monologue Builds Trust Faster Than Polished Narration
Sharing what you were thinking in a moment does something no other technique can: it gives the audience access to the narrator's inner world.
Instead of "I was excited," Humm suggests something like "I thought, this is going to be so cool, finally I can see her after all that time." The first version tells the audience an emotion label. The second version lets them hear the thought as it actually occurred, messy and informal and real.
The critical rule with thoughts is to keep them raw. Don't polish internal monologue into something articulate and composed. Nobody thinks in complete, well-structured sentences during a real moment. They think in fragments, reactions, and half-formed observations. "Oh no, this is bad" is more believable than "I realized at that moment that the situation had deteriorated significantly." The first one sounds like a person thinking. The second one sounds like a person writing a report about thinking.
In video scripts, internal monologue creates intimacy. The viewer feels like they're inside the creator's head, which builds trust and connection in a way that external narration cannot replicate. When a creator says "and I'm standing there thinking, there's no way he's about to say what I think he's going to say," the audience leans in because they're now sharing a private thought in real time.
Direct Dialogue Creates Characters, Paraphrasing Creates Props
This is the technique Krasinski used most effectively, and it's the one most creators skip.
"He goes, you married Emily Blunt?" is fundamentally different from "the agent was surprised I married Emily Blunt." The first version lets the audience hear the agent's voice, his disbelief, his tone. The second version filters everything through the narrator and strips out the texture.
Dialogue creates characters, and characters create investment. The moment you let someone in your story speak in their own voice, they become a person rather than a prop in your narrative. The customs agent in Krasinski's version has personality. He has a specific way of expressing surprise. In the summarized version, he's just "an agent" who "was surprised."
Humm's rule is absolute: don't paraphrase. Let people speak. Even if you can't remember the exact words, reconstruct the conversation as dialogue. "She said, I don't think that's going to work" is always more engaging than "she expressed doubt about the plan." Always.
For scripting purposes, this means writing out conversations rather than describing them. If your script contains the phrase "he told me that" followed by a summary, rewrite it as direct speech. This single change can transform a flat section into one that holds attention, because the audience is now listening to a conversation rather than hearing about one.
Slowing Down Your Best Moments Signals They Matter
This is the meta-technique that ties the other four together. Zooming in means slowing the story down to real-time speed at the moments that matter most.
Most storytellers rush through their best moments. The climax of the customs story, the agent's reaction to hearing "Emily Blunt," could have been told in five seconds of summary. Instead, Krasinski stretched it out. He recreated the pause. He mimicked the agent's face. He let the moment breathe at the speed it actually happened.
Zooming in is a pacing decision. You're telling the audience "this part matters" by giving it more time, more detail, more space. The less important parts of a story can move at summary speed. The moments that carry the emotional weight need to move at the speed of lived experience.
Humm uses the phrase "take the audience into the trenches," and that's exactly what zooming in does. You're not reporting from above anymore. You're standing in the moment, second by second, and the audience is standing there with you.
The practical application is to identify the 1 to 3 moments in your script that carry the most emotional or informational weight, and expand them. Give them dialogue, thoughts, actions, and sensory details. Compress everything else. The contrast between compressed and expanded time is itself a storytelling tool, because the audience instinctively understands that the slow moments are the ones worth paying attention to.
Five Questions That Turn a Script Review Into a Storytelling Audit
These five techniques work as a pre-production scoring rubric. Before a script goes to filming, a reviewer can check five things:
- Does the script establish a specific location in each scene or story section?
- Are the verbs action-oriented or summary-oriented?
- Does the narrator share raw internal thoughts at key moments?
- Is dialogue written as direct speech or paraphrased into summary?
- Does the script zoom into its most important moments, or does it rush through them at the same pace as everything else?
A script that scores well on all five will almost certainly be more engaging than one that doesn't, because these techniques address the fundamental mechanics of how humans process stories. We visualize locations, we track movement, we connect with thoughts, we listen to dialogue, and we pay closest attention when the pacing tells us "this moment matters."
For content teams producing at scale, this rubric takes about 3 to 5 minutes per script to apply. The reviewer doesn't need to rewrite anything. They just need to flag which techniques are missing from which sections and send it back to the writer with specific notes: "Section 2 has no dialogue, can you reconstruct the client conversation?" or "The product demo section is all summary, zoom into the moment where the feature actually clicks."
The gap between content that informs and content that connects is rarely about the information itself. Two creators can cover the same topic with the same insights and produce vastly different results. The one that zooms in, that lets characters speak, that shares the raw thought and places you in a specific room doing a specific thing: that's the one people remember and share. Krasinski's customs story contained about 15 seconds of actual information. Everything else was technique, and the technique is what made it unforgettable.
