A phrase I’m all too familiar with since I catch public transport too.

Anyway… we kickstarted our second week in the Picture This! studio by screening a short French film where a woman is hoodwinked by a man’s skit on the subway. My interpretation of the protagonist, which is the woman, is that it’s pretty clear that she is single and longs for a loving relationship when she stares at a couple on the subway escalators. She ends up falling for a man’s skit on the train who announces his search for a loving relationship, and she actually gets off the next stop like he said, if anyone was interested to get with him. (Side note: I did feel bad for her because that would’ve been pretty embarrassing, and like I said before, I know all about waiting for the next train.)

If you’re curious, you can watch the short film here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqwgeZooUmQ

What I found interesting about this short film was how action driven it was. The only dialogue present was the monologue that the man does on the train, as well as the short conversation he has with another man contradicting him. But the rest very much relies on the woman’s facial and body expressions.

It made me wonder how the script for this short would look like because if we’re looking just at the man and woman, it’s a one sided conversation where one is a speaker and the other is a responder. And if we’re picturing script layouts, I can guess two ways that this could have been written:

1. The entire dialogue of the man followed by action descriptors; or
2. The dialogue broken up between action descriptors to give the actor more directions in between the dialogue and give more context to the protagonist’s situation.

Something else that I found interesting was how the woman didn’t have any dialogue yet she is the protagonist. This was pretty impressive for me and it started to make me think about writing our own short film screenplay. I thought that this was a good example of how visual story telling can be done with minimal diegetic dialogue between characters and I wondered how I could do the same or something similar.

And I suppose voice-overs could be a similar technique to employ in terms of one-sided conversations as this short did. Voice-overs are obviously internal monologues, but this could still be similar as the actor would be the speaker and the audience would be the ones responding to the dialogue. And as for visuals, we could see characters interacting without them actually conversing with each other.