What a semester. What a studio.

Having more production knowledge than screenwriting, Picture This has been both insightful and challenging. While I have attempted to write screenplays in the past, it soon dawned upon me that what I knew about screenwriting was nothing more than the formatting of one.

Using techniques specific to screenwriting in order to achieve the audiovisuals of this writing medium has been fairly difficult for me in the beginning. Again, I didn’t actually know much about screenwriting and I am more used to writing in prose. This definitely shaped the birth of my idea as I wrote a story about something I knew I could definitely write in prose but also knew I would struggle to write into a screenplay.

So keeping with this theme of challenging myself (also known as subjecting myself to torture just for fun), I chose to write, not only a story that was inspired by personal experiences, but one that was also very much placed within the internal. And it definitely was a challenge to write as I’ve come to learn that screenplays are very much about describing the action, so how are you supposed to describe outwardly what is going on inside a person?

This was where my experiences of being behind a camera also shaped my writing. The picture was already inside my head, of how the story is meant to look like, but something else I learned over the past few weeks is that a screenplay shouldn’t tell a director how to direct and actors how to act. There should be enough room to leave for interpretation.

In writing my short screenplay, I got an insight into this fine line between being very specific about what is happening and not overdoing it so others can still apply their interpretations. What helped me get through it was writing the way I knew how, but then later editing it with the new knowledge I’ve gained. This means that in my early drafts, I had the things that we’ve learned you shouldn’t have in a script – adverbs, ‘is’, ‘are’ amongst many others. But then as I read it over, I wore this new pair of glasses as a screenwriter and customised it to fit within the scope of what a legit script should read like.

I suppose that’s something else I gained in this studio – a new pair of creative lens. And it’s something that I know will help me in my future adventures in the world of media.