If the script is bad, the drawings don’t matter. I’ve watched this happen more than once — a client turns up with a beautiful storyboard and the whole thing dies in the voiceover, because nobody wrote the words for the format.
Most advice out there says “keep it simple, be conversational,” then wanders off. Nobody explains the actual hard part, which is getting the words and the drawing to move together.
We write and illustrate in one pass at Drawphics, so those two things never separate. Here’s roughly what we do. Most of the scripts we illustrated are for Saas teams, tanning departments, and a few agencies who white label the work.
A regular video script works fine on audio alone — you can close your eyes and follow it. A whiteboard script can’t do that, because every line has to answer a second question at the same time: what’s on screen while this sentence plays?
If the answer is “nothing” or “three different things at once,” the line is broken. Doesn’t matter how good it sounds read aloud.
So we write words and drawings together from draft one. Write the narration first and storyboard it later, and you end up with sentences too complicated to draw at a natural pace. Then either the drawing gets rushed or the voiceover slows to a crawl. Write the line, look at it, ask what the viewer sees. Can’t picture one quick image? The line goes back.
Start with the idea map, not the words
Before writing a single line of narration, break the video into small beats. Short phrases, not sentences.
This is where weak scripts fall apart. Someone jumps from a topic outline straight into narration and crams three ideas into one sentence, because nobody separated them beforehand. Then the illustrator has to guess which idea to draw.
- List every distinct idea as a short phrase. Put them in the order a first-time viewer needs them.
- Cut anything that doesn’t support the one core takeaway. Only after the map is locked do you write narration for each beat.
A whiteboard script is really a chain of small, drawable beats. The map stops you writing paragraphs and leaving the illustrator to sort out the mess. Keep it on one page.
One idea per sentence, no exceptions
The urge to sound thorough pushes you toward long compound sentences. Resist it. Every sentence gets exactly one concept.
Read each sentence aloud and ask what single image it triggers. More than one? Split it. None? Rewrite or cut it.
Two patterns cause most of the trouble. The first is the and-sentence — two ideas joined by “and.” Those almost always need splitting. The second is the setup sentence, the one that only exists to introduce the next one. It carries no image, so it goes. I cut a lot of these. Writers love them and viewers don’t miss them.
Metaphor beats literal illustration, every time
Abstract concepts — growth, risk, alignment, efficiency — rarely have an obvious literal image. Force one and you get something generic (a bar chart) or confusing. A good metaphor carries part of the meaning itself, which lets the sentence run shorter.
| Concept | Weak literal approach | Stronger visual metaphor |
| Growth | A bar chart going up | A plant breaking through concrete |
| Risk | A red warning sign | A tightrope walker without a net |
| Connection | Two boxes with a line | Interlocking puzzle pieces |
| Confusion | A question mark | A tangled knot of string |
| Efficiency | A clock | A cluttered desk becoming one clean surface |
The test is whether the metaphor reads instantly. If the narration has to explain the drawing, the metaphor has failed. Describe the image to someone who hasn’t read the script, ask what it means. Matches your intent? Keep it. Doesn’t? Change the image — don’t add words to rescue it.
One caveat, and this trips people up: avoid metaphors that depend on cultural knowledge. If the video will be translated, stick to images that carry the same meaning across languages. Some of our best metaphors in English don’t survive the trip.
Watch the pacing between voice and pen
Long narration over a slow drawing creates an awkward pause. Fast narration over a half-formed drawing rushes the viewer. You can feel both problems, even if you can’t articulate them.
You don’t need frame-by-frame timing at script stage. Just a rough sense of how long each visual takes to build.
| Drawing complexity | Approx. draw time | Matching narration |
| Simple icon or shape | 1–2 sec | 3–5 words |
| Single character or object | 3–5 sec | One short sentence |
| Multi-element scene | 6–10 sec | Two connected sentences, usually |
| Complex diagram or process | 10–15 sec | A short paragraph, broken across the reveal |
Treat those as guides, not rules. Better than having no visual pacing awareness at all.
Spoken narration runs about 130–150 words per minute, so a 60-second script lands in that range once you allow for pauses. Write it, time the read, then cut. Don’t speed up the voiceover to make it fit — that’s how you get a video that sounds like an auctioneer.
Make it sound like speech before the voice artist touches it
Whiteboard animation feels like someone explaining something to you across a table. The script has to sound that way before the voice artist opens their mouth.
Use contractions. Favour shorter words — “use,” not “utilise.” Keep to one subordinate clause per sentence. Read every draft aloud. And if you wouldn’t say it to a colleague across a table, cut it.
Written English tolerates long noun phrases and passive voice; spoken English doesn’t. “The implementation of the process” looks fine on the page and sounds terrible out loud. Read the draft into your phone, listen back once, and the stiff sentences jump out immediately. I do this every time and I still catch things.
The checklist, in this order
Catching a structural problem early saves you polishing sentences that are about to get cut. So run it in this order.
Pacing first. Read aloud at a natural pace and time it — target 130–150 wpm, so a 60-second video usually lands between 150 and 300 words. Flag any section where the narration runs longer than the drawing can support.
Then sequencing. Check that every sentence introduces one new visual idea, and that every abstract concept has a clear visual metaphor.
Tone last. Read aloud again and ask whether it sounds like a person talking. Cut any phrase that exists only to sound professional.
If you can, run it past a second person. The writer knows what each line is supposed to mean; a fresh reader only sees what’s on the page.
Mistakes we see over and over
- Front-loading context — thirty seconds of setup before the main point.
- Cramming two or three points into one sentence and one drawing.
- Literal visuals for abstract ideas. Accurate, and boring.
- No clear ending — the video informs but never tells the viewer what to do next.
- Writing for length instead of the beat count the idea needs.
Working with a writer or studio
Clients know the subject. Studios know pacing. Split the work that way and it goes smoothly.
The client supplies the message, the facts and the accuracy check. The writer supplies beat structure, pacing and visual choices. Neither side writes alone.
Before you hand a script to a studio, confirm three things: your core takeaway in one sentence, the target runtime, and whether the video will be translated.
What we bring
We write whiteboard scripts the way we illustrate them — as one continuous process, with the person thinking about visual metaphor writing the line.
Our work is built around original illustration and character design, so the script isn’t written against a template library. The metaphor fits the message, not whatever clip art happens to be available.
If your script isn’t ready for illustration, get a second read. Pacing problems are cheap to fix at script stage. Expensive once the drawings exist.
We once landed the project when a client sent a script that needed 12 seconds just to draw the opening diagram. We simply cut the diagram into three elements and sentences into eight words and yes the project delivered according to the requirements.
See how we approach whiteboard animation as a format, or get in touch to talk through a project.