This week was the first week of the studio and a large part of it was an introduction to how scripts are created, both in terms of the actual writing and the formatting. This led me to wonder how defined the structure of scripts actually are – in some instances there are appears to be more flexibility than first thought. Leaving aside wondering who first decided that scripts would be structured the way they are – this is probably as useless as wondering who first decided to milk a cow, and what they hell were they thinking. A more important question is, why do we still do it this way? Why are we still using a typewriter font when typewriters long became irrelevant, and we have a range of different fonts available to us? Don’t tell me the answer is just ‘because it looks cool.’ I mean, you’re not wrong, but it just makes no sense.

My high school English teacher once told me something along the lines of you have to know the rules in order to break them. A lot of people probably say that. Does this apply to screenwriting? It seemed that a lot of times during the class where we examined the screenplays of popular films that one would say, don’t do this or that, and then whilst reading the actual script the writer would have done exactly the thing that was deemed incorrect, and there’d be a yeah but… For example, that you’re not supposed to write ‘cut’ or ‘pan to,’ as it draws the reader out of the visuals and reminds them that they’re reading a script. But then this is okay if a director is writing his own script. Or as the author of the screenplay guidelines reading proposes, that it is okay if it is a shooting script but not a spec script. Who is deciding this anyway? I’d like to find out in what other ways the rules of screenwriting are not clearly defined or illogical or really more guidelines than rules.