writing for a visual medium

The readings concerning writing for a visual medium primarily focused on, well, finding a focus. This makes sense, and it's a common theme among writing for all mediums. In the past, most of my experience has been in news writing; I've written a lot of news/arts/etc stories, and the semester I write editorials. And in every one of these writing situations, I've had to find a focus; if you can't come up with one sentence to effectively summarize the point that you're trying to make or the intent you're pursuing with a story, you may need to rethink about whether the story makes sense.
Anyway. There are a lot of things that writing for a visual medium has in common with writing for print, but there are also a lot of key differences. Most of these are structural; when writing for a visual medium, you have to concentrate on making the entire piece engaging, but you don't necessarily have to have the most important fact first. You don't have to follow inverted pyramid structure all the time, as you should with print news stories. A person is more likely to watch an entire 1:30 news package than they are to read a really long story with lots of information, so you can rest assured they'll probably watch the whole thing and you don't have to make the ending/conclusion the least important. However, since you have less time than space to cover your issue, every soundbite, standup and piece of natural sound should have a purpose. And because its a visual medium, every picture should be carefully thought out; every piece of video should be shot for a reason, and should not only add to a story but, really, construct it. It's most important to keep in mind that you're doing the story visually for a reason; do what you couldn't do through just a print story.