Pitch Craft - Timed Spoken Scripts

A timed script is engineering plus theater. The clock is a hard constraint; the storytelling is why anyone remembers you. Every failure mode of a bad script traces to violating one of those two, so this skill enforces both: beats before words, and the craft rules in references/storytelling.md.

Steps

1. Beats before words

Get three things before drafting a single sentence:

• The beats: what is on screen (or on stage) at each moment, in order. For a demo voiceover these are the recording's milestones - use the sidecar's verified t_video values, never planned holds (see demo-video's Gate 3); for a deck they are the slides; for a live pitch they are slides plus stage moments (team intro, demo break).
• The clock: either fixed windows from an existing recording (0:16 -> 0:43), or a total slot to budget (a 5-minute pitch).
• What each beat proves: a beat with no claim behind it gets cut, not narrated.

If the beats don't exist yet, build the beat sheet first and get the user's sign-off. For a demo film that beat sheet is demo-video's storyboard - five columns, journey coverage, Gate 1 approval - not an ad-hoc list. Prose written before beats always runs long and anchors the story to sentences instead of evidence.

2. Budget the words

Read references/timing.md and compute a word ceiling per segment (words = seconds x words-per-second; voiceover ~2.4-2.6 wps, live stage ~2.0-2.2 wps). Write the budget line at the top of the script (e.g. 5:00 slot = ~2:30 spoken + 2:36 demo). If the numbers don't fit before writing, they won't fit after.