Barbelith Underground > Creation

didn't mean any snark, sorry you read it that way.

i think the intended audience is important -- if you're going to shoot it yourself, then all that advice about "don't do camera angles" is less important. if you're going to try to sell i to major producers, then getting the form exactly right is much more important. if you want to get a fairly good amount of money to do a movie, there is a major difference between how you might approach the writing then, say, when you write experimental poetry, or a song.

which isn't to say you must cravenly write within a formula; far from it. you must bring a totally unique and personal story to the table. but you must also do it while thinking about what it means for people to throw down the money a movie needs and how to keep people sitting still for 2 hours in a dark room / at the television / etc.

i do think that begining, middle, end is exactly where we get the tree act structure from conceptually. even if the story is told backwards (memento) non-linear (pulp fiction) or totally shuffled (bad timing) there is still a discernible forward motion to the emotion of the story, and it's important to be able to see that in movies and figure out how it's going to work in your own script.

reading other scripts is incredibly helpful. its really interesting to see how people describe certain kinds of actions, how long scenes go on for in terms of page count, and what the story-telling aspects of dialogue looks like on the page.

i also find it super rewarding to watch movies and think about them in terms of script pages. i always watch dvds with the timer on and note down when interesting turning points happen, interpreting the minute numbers as page numbers. i actually keep an massive folder on my laptop of all the movies i've watched (when i can be bothered, i mean) with entries like "18 - first sight of the girl. he's doomed" (edward scissorhands) or "24 he gets the girls to come with him... END OF ACT" (The Swimmer) -- this way you can get this at-a-glance look at how other movies tell their stories in terms of TIME.

another fun / informative thing to do when you are watching movies is to spot the act breaks. notice what minute those happen and how each act ties the story together.

all this is like a totally different form of criticism than when you are interpreting or analyzing the meaning / metaphors / etc. of a film. this all a way of understanding the storytelling from within, so you can see what's at work in the mechanics and (hopefully) use that as you are building your own toolset for scriptwriting.

Screenplays