Documentary Script Writer — Wildlife & Nature Storytelling (Human Writers Only)

Company: Eterna Animal

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Read this part first

Most people would scroll past a video about ants.

Then a guy in the Philippines spends thirty minutes talking about a 1,200-gallon glass box, and five million people find themselves emotionally invested in whether a colony of trap-jaw ants can hold their territory against carpenter ants. People cry over a colony collapse. In a tank. About bugs.

That is not luck, and it is not the footage. It is the writing.
That is the job we are hiring for.

Who we are

Eterna Animal is a wildlife and nature documentary studio built for YouTube and long-form streaming. We make films about animals, the people obsessed with them, and the moments where the two collide — the kind of stories that stick with someone for a week after they watch.

We are currently in production on a feature documentary about the 2011 Zanesville exotic animal escape, alongside an ongoing series slate and an expert interview segment.

We are small, we move fast, and the writing is the whole thing.

What you'll actually be doing

•⁠ ⁠Writing full documentary scripts, 10–30 minutes, from research to final narration draft
•⁠ ⁠Writing serialized episode scripts where arcs, callbacks, and running threads carry across a season
•⁠ ⁠Building cold opens that make someone stop scrolling in the first eight seconds — and earn the thirty minutes that follow
•⁠ ⁠Researching deep: papers, archives, news reports, court records, primary interviews. Not the first page of Google.
•⁠ ⁠Prepping interviews — background packs and question sets that get a real answer instead of a press release
•⁠ ⁠Writing voiceover that a human being can actually say out loud without sounding like a textbook
•⁠ ⁠Knowing when to stop writing and let the footage breathe

The one hard rule: you write it, not a machine

We have tried AI-written scripts. We are done with them.

The facts came out fine. The sentences were clean. And every single one was dead on arrival — no pulse, no stakes, no point of view, no reason to care. Viewers left at forty seconds, and honestly, we would have too.

Our audience needs to feel something. Awe. Dread. Grief. Delight. That comes from a person who noticed something and could not shut up about it — not from a model predicting the most average next word.

*Our policy, plainly:*

•⁠ ⁠Research tools, transcription, fact-checking, spell-check: fine. Use whatever helps.
•⁠ ⁠The actual prose, the structure, the voice, the emotional turns: yours. Typed by you. Thought of by you.
•⁠ ⁠We check. We ask you to explain your choices out loud. It's obvious very quickly.

If your process is "prompt it, then clean it up," this role will make both of us miserable. No hard feelings — please skip it.

What we're looking for

•⁠ ⁠A voice. We can teach you our format. We cannot teach you a personality on the page.
•⁠ Emotional honesty. You can make a stranger care about an animal they have never heard of and would have called ugly an hour ago.
•⁠ ⁠Structure instincts. Hook, promise, tension, complication, turn, payoff. You feel where a scene sags.
•⁠ Writing for the ear. Short sentences. Rhythm. Room to breathe. Read your draft aloud and you'll hear what's wrong.
•⁠ ⁠Genuine curiosity about animals. You don't need a biology degree. You do need to be the kind of person who has fallen down a three-hour rabbit hole about a species nobody asked you about.
•⁠ Strong conversational English. Warm and clear, not stiff and academic.
•⁠ ⁠Reliability. You hit deadlines, and you tell us early when you can't.

Nice to have (not required)

•⁠ ⁠Background in biology, zoology, veterinary science, or conservation
•⁠ ⁠Experience writing for YouTube specifically, and an understanding of retention and audience drop-off
•⁠ ⁠Experience with interview or investigative writing
•⁠ ⁠You already watch this kind of content for fun

What we're not looking for

•⁠ ⁠Blog writers pivoting to video with no ear for spoken language
•⁠ ⁠Anyone whose samples all read in the same smooth, weightless, listicle voice
•⁠ ⁠Writers who need a full brief spoon-fed before they can start
•⁠ ⁠"SEO content specialists"

How it works

1.⁠ Paid trial script. One episode, fully paid, real assignment, real feedback.
2.⁠ ⁠If it clicks: ongoing work with a steady script quota and a raise once you know the voice.
3.⁠ Long term: you become the lead writer on a series with your name on it. We want someone who grows into this, not someone who fills a slot.

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How to apply — read carefully, this is the filter

Applications that skip any step get deleted unread. Sorry. It's the only way we find you.

Subject line: ⁠ COLD OPEN — [the animal you chose] ⁠

Send us all four of these:

1. The test. Write a 150–200 word cold open about *an animal you have personally seen, in real life, that most people would find boring.* A gecko on your wall. A carabao. A stray dog. A moth. Make us care about it. This is the entire job in 200 words.
2. A voice recording, 2 minutes. Vocaroo or Loom, unscripted. Tell us why you picked that animal, and one line in your own draft you would cut and why. Just talk. We are not judging your accent — we are listening for the same person who wrote the script.
3. Your best existing work. A script, a video you wrote, an essay, anything. Plus one sentence on what you would change about it now.
4. Share the test as a Google Doc (link with comment access) rather than pasted text. We look at version history.

Where to send: to this job posting
We read every application that follows the instructions. If your cold open is good, you will hear from us within a week.

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Eterna Animal — wildlife documentaries for people who never bought that they were "just animals."