SCREEN WRITING
I can say screen writing has nothing to do with alphabetical
language. My camera is my ‘pen’ or ‘stylus’ and I write upon screen in the
language of ‘Cinema’ ; that is images and sounds orchestrated or syntaxed in a
certain meaning making manner, universal or vernacular, depending upon my
choice of symbology.
Most often, however, we have to write ‘proposals’ because
before we can start a production we need to let certain sort of people know,
certain basic ideas or themes & premises & often a financial scope of
our project. These ‘people’ are usually not directly associated with film
making, its skills and practices. So, a certain narrative, descriptive,
analytic, or even poetic resume of what’s on your mind you make hoping the
reader will get impressed enough to say ‘yes’ . This, by no stretch of
imagination, is the correlate to the ‘film’ that you may have visualized to
some extent in your mind or made notes about as you dreamt images &
sequences or bits of racy dialogue and what have you.
There is a basic document, however, called
“The Script” which initiates unit members or the inner circle into
vicissitudes of your film at various
levels. Copies of it will be shared and studied by technicians and craftsmen,
artists and professionals in their own perspective and in their own privacy as
often the entire film can neither be visualized nor spoken about in one sitting
and every body may or may not be present at all sittings. This document is a
bench-mark for during shooting one may simply take off & never refer to script
in a tsunami of inspiration but in the absence of such inspiring, heady moments
one can always fall back upon the minimum essential program , so to speak. The unit members will understand it in the
perspective of their own ‘departmental’ methodology. Their creative skills will contribute to richness and endow your
work with nuance & refinement. To this end we make a ‘Director’s
Script’ ; a central document, fairly elaborate and technical, consisting of
alphabetical language describing physical actions and sounds, speech &
musical accentuations if any, on a chronology of images which are again, described in terms of physical
attributes like light, focal length, composition, perspective & depth, fore / mid & background,
color, sound effects and volumetrics, commentary or dialogue even grunts,
coughs & sneezes; movement of frame independent or vis-à-vis
movement within the frame…. choreography and a thousand other details depending
upon the individual writer’s imagination and ability for abstraction. This last
is extremely important as there is a tendency to slip into the ‘symbolic’ or
‘poetic’ or literary sort of writing which may have been good for the
aforementioned “Proposal” but anathema for Director’s Script. It must only
speak in terms of physically understandable / achievable bits of action and
endeavor “This side” & “That side” of the Frame. Got it?
Basically, it’s a ‘dialectical instrument’ that we are
creating . There is an inherent
dialectical interplay in its format which goes
…
IDEA/SYNOPSIS/TREATMENT/SCENARIO and onto “DIRECTOR’S SCRIPT” containing
Scenes (numbered) and its breakdown in terms of shots (also numbered). There is
a dialectical relationship built among the core members like designers, camera
& sound technicians, actors & editors as well as production assistants
and managers who all study and refer and cull out of it bits of do-able work
and imagine bits of physical details to be brought together at one given time
that is when that particular shot is being ‘taken’. This is careful
orchestration and not quite possible without a good “Director’s Script” in loose leaf files, in the hands of each
& every member of the unit. They will, at their own level de-construct these bits you have denoted and come to a
working knowledge of what’s required in a given scene, at what time and where.
Again, creative take offs are always possible and discussions welcome, but the
Script shall remain the basic bench-mark; you can soar above that & sky or
possibly ‘budget’ is the limit but not fall short of its demands.
Suffice so much for the moment… shall continue later.
Caca readings #652
SCREEN WRITING cntd.
The process of film making actually is a
process of giving form to that which is form-less. In other words, it is a
process of progressively crystallizing abstractions, dreams, visualizations in
our imagination and script writing is step-one towards this end.
IDEA : In the
‘Authorship Mode’ of screen writing, the author, that is the film maker herself
writes her own script conceived according to her own visualization. It is
eminently possible, therefore, for one to have a ‘kernel’ … in seed form, in a
phrase or in an illuminated sentence to
evoke the entire meaning and feeling of the enterprise. It’s a tall order to
start with but loose-leaf sheets or lap-top pages can come to our rescue; in
the sense that one need not actually begin at the beginning! One can start writing. After once one has got
a fair grip of the substance / corpus,
one can attempt to coin a crystalline word construct and see if it works as
“The Idea” … it can change and alter throughout the process of writing the
script until one is satisfied with what one got.
SYNOPSIS : a short
narrative. It describes the theme in general terms to give the “Idea” a
specific content. Synopsis need not be too brief, but it does
not carry itself very well encumbered with details. Broad blocks, the
beginning, middle and the end, some sketchy yet telling symptoms of characters,
locations, so that the reader gets a clear picture of “what” is to be “said”.
TREATMENT : is
indicative of precisely “How” it is being said. To evoke a certain form, tone
and texture peculiar to your film, to proclaim your élan or particular style of
the author; to approach that particular class of society, age group,
intelligence level; the same thought,
you I hope will agree with me when I put it to you that it needs to be articulated in each case,
differently. That is the treatment we give to address the same matter to different
targets as we alter the ‘Treatment’ each time to suit the purpose.
So between Synopsis and Treatment, the reader gets a clear
picture of “What” is being said and “How” is it being said and most hopefully,
to whom it is being said. Care must be taken, however, for a good marriage of
“Form” with “Content”; obvious mis-match, unless stylistically called for is
best avoided.
SCENARIO : This is
where I think it is actually at. I wake up in small hours of night, jump out of
bed and with bleary eyes write down a scene or a sequence, an image or a fragment
of dialogue in a situation I’d been working on perhaps during day-light hours. It’s rewarding to sleep by one self in utter
quietitude and complete darkness during those contemplative periods of
screen-writing! There is no one way, and there is no compulsion for following linear
progression of Idea / Synopsis/ Treatment / scenario / and even the Director’s
script if you are dexterous and can guess where to place what your imagination
just threw up in an alphabetic word
construct. It is definitely not the film, I repeat, because we are working with
language, a different medium and a tyrannical one if you ask me but its only
words & words are all we have, to keep our imaginings from evaporating every
next morning …! So, its good to write down whatever bits and pieces, and
zor-lagi-fa-yu-ba meaning, “May the Force be with you” if you can sit and write
like professionals, like a piddling cow or
like how oil flows down in one steady, cogent stream. For me, normally it comes as flashes, like a
collage and I have to sort it out later on. There is no defined universal path,
what I am sharing with you is what has worked for me.
Now, the brass tacks; a scenario is not a piece of
literature. It is a visual approximation in words (no symbols, similes or
figures of speech please..!) with as much detail & clarity on what is seen
and what is heard as one can conjure up. By all means you may like to make
general scenes, separating big chunks of the narrative like chapters, and even
give short descriptions of what happens
in particular scenes like chapter-headings of Victorian novels. In the body we give
detailed description of space time, action & intent of dialogue; ( need not
actually fill in precise words a character will speak on screen). What sounds
surround the scene or what sounds make signification for progression of our meaning. We do not spell
out ‘the meaning’; we remain out side,
describing the exterior, the look, the action in order to indicate the
‘interior’ … as if it were. I hope we are together, so far …?!
So we go on adding to this central document called Scenario, we give it a working ‘Title’ which
may point toward our intended meaning, or we may not like to name it before it
is even born; we can name our film when it is complete in all aspects or along
the way, somewhere; working title is prone to changes. It is quite flexible if
our focus is right, if our intuition is strong and steadfast we shall sail
through until one day … or night, we
shall all of a sudden come to realize that we have finished writing our
scenario..!
One can take a caesura at this stage. Many pegs of production tent can start being hammered into
place. The scenario will give clear clues to an experienced Production Manager
about Budget. You and your inner circle can start the process of “Casting” and
“Location Hunting” or “Set Designing” if
you please; you can start writing dialogues and as you do so you can shift
gears into making your “Director’s Script”.
DIRECTOR’S SCRIPT :
essentially is a hugely expanded and amplified version of Scenario.
First of all Scenes here are defined as ‘space-time continuums’ ; they are different in so much as even if it is slamming the front door and
walking away on graveled drive-way, when
the ‘action’ shifts from one to another place and there is a fracture in either
special or temporal thread, the scene is deemed to have shifted. These scenes
have to be numbered, mention has to be made whether the scene is in-doors or
out-doors, whether it is day / night / or some other twilight point, a location
has to be specified and if it is overcast, windy or scorching. In the body of
the scene entire action is broken by semantics / syntax into virtually shots that will be taken on actual shoot.
Dialogues often serve as a clue for shot break down although the strict method
would be to evoke your innate ‘Cinematic’ … ‘Editorial’ … as well as
& most specially your ability to fragment the unit space / time /
action in order to interfere with it according to concepts of ‘mis-en-scene’.
The description almost visually evokes the tension, pace & feeling, stress,
the poetic or dramatic structuring of action through shot taking; yet
virtually, which in a sense is de-constructing the scene only in order to
re-construct it later during editing stage; but here they are both fused into
one . There is the sound section to complement visuals and there are durations
of each shot as we write. Sum total of durations can be roughly mentioned at
the top with other details of time / space / day / night / etc.
This is another one of those exercises when you simply jump
out of bed and behold fingertips flying on your feather-touch key-board or
pounding at it in excited frenzy. Your powers of ‘visualization’ can illuminate
any given scene at any given time and you have to instinctively obey its
command and ‘Roger Wilco’ ! once you do one scene nicely, technically you can
repeat performance and do as many scenes as are required to complete your film.
Well … !! Good luck .. .
Rahatavalokit
Cacareadings #
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