Scriptwriting

Since 2014, I have worked both professionally and voluntarily in a range of marketing, PR and journalistic roles that required me to learn the fundamentals of both solo and collaborative scriptwriting. This page showcases some of my work in these areas.

Kumon Castletroy

A selection of instructional videos I wrote, filmed and edited for the Castletroy branch of the afterschool education company Kumon.

Students’ Union election campaign video

In Spring 2020, I found myself volunteering as Campaign Manager for a candidate running for the position of President of UL Student Life, the University of Limerick’s undergraduate students’ union. With the campaign hastily forced online by the COVID-19 lockdown, we were concerned that a a full week of policy videos would bore the student body at a time when everyone was under sudden and unexpected stress. To alleviate this, the team worked on a selection of more lighthearted videos to accompany the serious messaging. The candidate herself, Katie Martin, is an accomplished video editor and oversaw the editing and production, with scripts by Katie, myself and my assistant Campaign Manager Roisín Ní Shuilleabháin. One of these videos, conceived by myself and Katie, was a Coronavirus-themed parody of the famous ‘go down the Winchester’ scene from Shaun of the Dead. I wrote the script and blocked out the scenes, which were filmed by members of our campaign team and edited by Katie. Despite being essentially a brief skit the video touched on several key planks of the campaign, including student opposition to the entire campus being completely shut down overnight with no amenities available for those in on-campus accommodation and a controversial attempt by the university to turn small single bedrooms into twin rooms in order to increase revenue. I am still proud of how well the video turned out, especially filmed in lockdown on no budget.

ULFM Society of the Year 2021 hustings video

For most of my time in the University of Limerick, I was heavily-involved in ULFM, the college radio station. Having left in 2020, I was drawn back in a year later to help with a special project: ULFM had been shortlisted for Club or Society of the Year in the annual Clubs & Societies awards, and due to the COVID-19 shutdown, the awards were being husted for digitally. Instead of hustings being a speech accompanied by visual aids, with plenty of scope to entertain and engage the live audience of voters, each of the shortlistees had to make a 3-minute video outlining their case for taking home the award. The brief from Clubs & Societies admin was to make something entertaining and creative that showed pride in the society’s accomplishments. A team of members of ULFM’s committee sat down to create a script. Katie Martin, ULFM’s Head of News, was in charge of editing and producing the video. The factual elements of the script were being written by a team consisting of Katie with contributions from other members of committee, while the entertaining content was being created by ULFM’s President (Chair of the Board) Alanna Meighan and Secretary Aimee Austin. This group of writers asked me to contribute as a script doctor to tighten up some of the jokes and ensure a good balance of humorous and factual content. I began this process during the collaborative writing stage, much of which was done during a multi-hour video call on Discord, but my contributions continued throughout the visual editing phase: as Katie trimmed the fat from the footage, she used me as a sounding-board to ensure the script still flowed despite some words, beats and pauses being trimmed. While my role in the creative process was small, it was exciting to get to participate in both the writing and editing stages of a video project, and I was overjoyed when ULFM subsequently took home the trophy.