Jack Fahey – s3382553
I think something that influenced how I will approach my future screenwriting tasks was something that was covered in week one of this course. When writing, my mind is always focused on the conventions we have been taught regarding screenwriting. Don’t use adjectives for example, or ensure that every description in the text can be represented visually, or try not to include any cinematography related notes etc
Reading through various screenplays and picking out what worked and what didn’t was largely helpful in terms of getting me to just write and leave conforming to the conventions later. I saw the texts such as Toy Story, Trainwreck, Thelma & Louise and others and each text had mistakes or clumsy writing occasionally. Or perhaps they used the wrong tense or too many adjectives. This showed me that its not such a stringent set of rules when screenwriting, but more a set of guidelines to best help you get your stories onto the paper.
These films were all hugely successful and the fact that they incorrectly used a tense in a scene description or used an adjective when they could have used a verb proves that the most important part of the writing is just that, the writing itself. Are you crafting a good story? Does it captivate your audience? Can the imagine the world you are creating? I know that this sounds easy to grasp and honestly self evident but one thing that was putting up somewhat of a mental roadblock was the act of making sure that every single word I used was precise and necessary. Making sure every single verb was in the right tense, making sure adjectives where used sparingly, if at all. And while its good practice for screenwriting, its also incredibly tedious and time consuming and it was getting in the way of me actually wanting to write. Now I just write and let it flow, and later on I can go back and edit and change things if they are completely out of line with the conventions.
Conversely, it also showed me what to look out for, and what pitfalls there could be. For example, how to pin point when you have written something as an inactive action, or how to write freely but ensure that while you do so, you aren’t writing anything that cannot be represented visually on film (probably the hardest one for me, since most of my prior writing is in book form). One example of this is from Frozen River. The description “Ray Hears it” doesn’t strictly work within the conventions of a screenplay because it draws the audience out of the screenplay. How do we know Ray hears it? How do you visually represent that? If the audience has to start thinking those things, then that means they are actively adding to the text and are very aware of what they are reading. And since, as we’ve discussed several times in class, the big task of screenwriting is to immerse the audience fully into the text and to get them to explore the text as an audio-visual experience, anything that draws them out of that immersion should be cut or re-written.
Two children yell at each other as they dart around the room. Rinaldo, slumped in a large, worn leather chair, hangs a cigarette over an ashtray with one hand. The other, pushes through the little hair that remains on his head. He tilts his head back, closes his eyes and presses the cigarette to his lips. Filling his lungs, he then exhales a grey cloud of smoke into the room. He slams his fist down onto the arm rest.
The children, eyes wide, flee the room. Rinaldo glances at a photograph across the room, a picture of his wife. He sighs, heaves his body up from the chair and ambles towards his childrens room, picking up a football along the way.
This is a very short piece of screenwriting I completed in class a few weeks ago. The goal of the piece was to take a poorly written introduction to a scene, and then rework it using the conventions we have learned about, such as using the correct tense, trying to avoid adjectives, keeping the writing succint etc.
What Works?
I think in terms of painting a picture of Rinaldo it does very well. The first two sentences describing him are the strongest in the whole piece my opinion. I think that you get a very clear sense of the kind of man he is. Obviously worn out from balancing his work and home life tenuously and somewhere around middle age because of his thinning hair and not the healthiest of men represented in his smoking habit. And while he is clearly upset with his children for creating so much noise, he eventually goes to play soccer with them.
This part “Rinaldo glances at a photograph across the room, a picture of his wife. He sighs, heaves his body up from the chair and ambles towards his childrens room, picking up a football along the way.” I thought was quite strong too. Its trying to hint at the loss of his wife prompting him to put in the extra effort for his children like she would have had she still been there. An important aspect of the exercise prompt was to capture his “guilt” at him not being the best father he could be. I tried to do this above by implying his wife had passed, and perhaps I could have done something extra here but I think it adequately represents his guilt when he sees his wife, and realises that perhaps he could be doing better for his kids even though he is tired from work.
What Could be Improved?
Firstly, I think perhaps the children could have been better described in a different piece. To be fair, I didn’t really see them as all that integral to this particular seen other than just representing what Rinaldo is neglecting. But in a longer form film you would obviously need to describe them further if this was an introductory scene.
I also thought that this sentence was … somewhat clumsy “Filling his lungs, he then exhales a grey cloud of smoke into the room.” I just couldn’t think of a better way to phrase it in the right tense at the time. Something like “He draws air deep into his lungs, then exhals a grey cloud of smoke into the room” might have been a better way to write it for example.
Lastly, as touched on before, there might have needed to be something more about the wife or lack thereof, although I do like the ambiguity it leaves. In a short exercise like this it doesn’t really tell you everything you need to know, but perhaps thats alright. I had imagined that, in a longer form, the film/short film etc would go on to explain the loss of his wife and why he was raising his two children alone.
Scholar of Cinema Chris Dzialo wrote that “screenplays should be experienced […] as a form of cinema itself” whereby “both, although via opposite polarities, are audio-visual (the screenplay cueing the images and sounds in our mind)” (2009, p. 109)
In this quote he is at surface level making a statement that sounds counter-intuitive. How can a written text exist as a piece of audio-visual storytelling? But that is what makes the form of screenwriting so unique. Unlike other writing, its entire purpose is to become a film and so it must communicate the audio-visual elements of the work to its audience (Ingolstrom, 2014). There are many rules in screenwriting texts, such as having separate sections for directions and lines, setting each scene in the mind of the reader, using as few words as necessary to keep the reader engaged when describing a character or scene etc in order to fully immerse the audience in the text. This is why a screenplay is similar to that of a film, because it should be experienced in much the same way. The Audience should be able to, just from the words on the page, relatively accurately imagine each scene visually in their mind.
This is the biggest challenge in screenwriting, in my opinion. Its one thing to craft a story, but it is another to use a form so devoid of sound or image as text to represent such an audio-visual medium like cinema. A screenwriting needs to, often using as few words as possible to ensure that the reader isn’t drawn out of the experience, continually focus the readers mind within the world, while also cueing to them what sounds they might be hearing, what they are seeing, which characters are nearby, the setting, the tone etc etc. All of this needs to be clear in an reader’s mind because, at the end of the day, if the audience cannot imagine the film while reading the screenplay, the text has ultimately failed its main goal of becoming a film, as naturally it would be unwise for a producer or directer etc to convert a text to cinema that they aren’t fully engaged in.
So I think the main crux of what Dzialo was trying to get to was that screenplays are an incredibly unique form. As although they exist entirely on the page in written word, the most important thing that they do is create a world full of images and sounds that captivate the audience and lead them through the story. If a screenplays ultimate goal is to become film, then its initial purpose is to create an imaginary world immediately in the readers mind, because once the audience can fully realise the visual and audio elements within the film, it is much easier for them to harness that initial imaginary film and begin forming it into a real one.
Reference:
Ingolstrom, A 2014, “Narrating Voices in the Screenplay text: How the Writer can Direct the Reader’s Visualisations of the potential film”, in Screenwriters and Screenwriting: Putting Practice into Context, Craig Batty (ed.) Polgrave Macmillan, New York
Dzialo, C 2009, ‘“Frustrated Time” narration: the screenplays of Charlie Kaufman’, in W Buckland (ed.), Puzzle films: complex storytelling in contemporary cinema, Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, pp. 107-28.
The prompt I have chosen is “I learned something in the studio that highlighted my previous experience/lack of previous experience with screenwriting”
The reading for week one by Mckee on description enlightened me on the topic of camera / cinematography related directions within a script (which I later learned, in week two, was a part of the extrafictional voice). I had only ever written scripts for things that I intended to shoot/direct, so including camera directions or notes made sense to me and seemed logical within that context. However Mckee argues that this sort of writing has no place in a screenplay, as it takes the intended reader out of the narrative and reminds them that they are reading a script. This, Mckee says, is because a director would “laugh at” the screenwriter telling them what techniques to use. Mckee even goes so far as to say that a writer should “Eliminate all camera and editing notations.”
I’ve learned that a better way to properly convey film and cinematographic techniques to the intended reader is to simply describe the scene in a way that paints a vivid scene in the readers mind. For example, rather than explicitly stating “close up on X’s hands” one could simply write “X plays with his / her wedding ring”. This obviously means that there will need to be a close up of the hand, without actually stating any sort of camera movement. Not only will this be less likely to come off as telling a director how to do their job, but it also flows better and creates a better image in the mind of the reader.