Describing One Medium Through Another

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The essential problem of writing for visual media comes from the difference between print as a medium, or words on a page, and the medium of moving images. You have to describe an audiovisual medium that plays in real time using a written medium that is abstract and frozen in time. So a description in words on a page of what is to be seen on a screen has limited value until it is translated into that medium itself.

Writing Not to be Read But to be Made

The fundamental premise of scriptwriting is that you are writing not to be read, but to be made. Just as the musical score is a set of instructions to musicians and a blueprint is a set of instructions to builders, a script is a set of instructions to a production crew to make a film, a video, or a television program. Only the ideas, scenes, and dialogue that are written down get made. This is the first principle to keep in mind. Whatever your vision is, whatever your idea is, whatever you want to see on the screen, you must describe it in language that a team of technicians and visual image workers can understand.

A script is fundamental to the process of making a movie, video, or any type of visual program. It is the basis for production. From it flows a huge number of production decisions, consequences, and actions. The first of these is cost. Every stroke of the pen (or every keystroke) implies a production cost to bring it to reality on the screen. Although the techniques of filmmaking and special effects are seemingly without boundaries these days, extravagant ideas incur extravagant cost. A writer must keep in mind that he writes a production budget with every word by virtue of the visual ideas contained in the script, whether that script is for a feature film or a training video. A script writer can reach an audience only by visualizing and writing potential scenes for directors and producers to shoot and edit. The finished work often reflects a multitude of creative choices and alterations unspecified by the writer.

Writing, Producing, and Directing

It is often said that a good script can be ruined by bad producing and bad directing, but good producing and good directing cannot save a bad script.

Producers and directors have a more recognizable role in the process because production is visible and material. However, the role of writer is sometimes combined with that of either producer or director. Some writers can direct, and some directors can write. Writing and producing can also be combined. If you study program credits, you will see some of these dual roles and combined responsibilities. Some individuals attempt triple responsibilities. Among the Academy Award nominees for 1998, James Cameron had a writer, director, and producer credit for Titanic (1998). Atom Egoyan, a lesser known Canadian director, had a triple credit in The Sweet Hereafter (1997).

As a rule, audiences pay little attention to the scriptwriter and often don’t recognize the producer or director. Audiences identify with the actors they see on screen. However, they do so only because the writer has created the story that the audience wants to hear, the characters that it believes in, and the words that it accepts as those characters’ words. A film or a television series gets made because a producer, a director, and sometimes key acting talent respond to the potential of the script idea. The script expresses the primary imaginative vision that can become a successful program.

The writer’s work is somewhat isolated because the writer is the originator. Others are waiting for the scriptwriter to deliver before they can do their work. However, strong collaboration can occur between the writer and the producers and directors, and sometimes with other writers. The scriptwriter’s work is less isolated than that of the traditional novelist, poet, or biographer, because those writers write their words to be read directly by the audience. They do not need any intermediary, except perhaps a publisher, whereas a scriptwriter is never read directly by the audience and needs a team of skilled technicians as intermediaries and a risky investment of millions to create a result visible on screen.

In the entertainment world, the viewing audience is usually much larger than the reading audience for a book. It is a measure of the media age we now live in that visual media are so predominant in our imaginations. In fact, the very word “audience” is a carryover from another age when audiences listened. The word derives from the Latin audio, meaning “I hear.” Perhaps we should invent a new word, “vidience,” from the Latin video, meaning “I see.” Printed media no longer have the monopoly they have enjoyed for five hundred years since the Gutenberg era and the invention of the printing press. With the invention of the motion picture by Edison in 1895, a visual medium was born that, with its electronic derivatives, has probably displaced the print medium as a primary form of entertainment and now rivals it as a form of communication. Audiences today are primarily viewing audiences.

Since the invention of the motion picture on film, these visual media have multiplied in type and nature so that a range of visual communication types now exists that requires scriptwriting of many different kinds. After movies came television and a dozen different types of program requiring a variety of writing talents. From television came portable television or video, programs recorded on a single camera and edited to be distributed on videotape rather than broadcast. Other exhibition media based on microchip technology synchronizing slide projectors led to extravagant multi-image and multimedia projections for business meetings, museums, and exhibitions. This led to video walls that involve composing images across banks of nine or twelve TV screens. New combinations of video and computer technology have led to the creation of interactive multimedia both for entertainment and instruction published on CD-ROMs, DVDs, and web sites.

Scriptwriters are indispensable to all of these visual media. Their craft and art lie behind every program. Every time you watch a program on television or see a movie or watch a corporate communication, remind yourself that it began as a script—as words on a page. Don’t walk out of the movies or switch the television channel when the credits roll! Look for the scriptwriting credit! According to the Writers’ Guild agreement with the producers of movies, the script credit must come immediately before the director’s, which is always the last credit.

Moving from Being a Viewer to Being a Creator

This brings us to the next point in your transformation from a beginner into a competent scriptwriter. Most of us begin with the experience of being an audience. We grow up going to the movies and watching television. A complete media experience written, produced, and edited is presented to us for our enjoyment. We are conditioned to be passive consumers of these images. We learn to interpret them. We do not think intensively about how they were created although some might have had a mild curiosity about this. We just enjoy them.

You begin to be a scriptwriter when you start to think about how the story got invented, who wrote the dialogue, who decided what the voice-over should say, whether it could have been better or different. It is a change of mind-set. A member of the audience decides to get up and cross over to the other side and become a creator. The writer creates for an audience. A writer has to know what it is to be an audience, but an audience does not have to know what it is to be a writer. This transition in awareness and in point of view must take place before you can function successfully as a scriptwriter. The following chapters are designed to engender that transition. It will take time. You are an apprentice to a craft. Where do you begin? Because you are writing in one medium for another, you have to change the way you have been used to writing, which was meant to be read by an audience, and instead write so that your writing works as a set of instructions for a production team.

The Producer Cannot Read Your Mind

Everything begins in your mind, in your imagination. Unless you write down what you see and hear, no one else knows about it. Beginning writers sometimes forget this. Unless the script contains a clear description of your vision from beginning to end, with no gaps, your vision will not reach the screen. The production people who make the script into screen images cannot read your mind. Rule number one: Do not hand over your scriptwriting prerogative and responsibility to the director or actor, or anyone else whose job it is to translate your script into a program. Too often they will take it and do something other than what you intended. If you leave blanks, they will fill in those blanks from their own perspectives. They have to—it is their professional responsibility. There are no empty frames in movies or television.

Instructions to the Production Crew

Consider the differences between the following sentences:

and,

To shoot the first statement leaves a number of decisions to the director and art director—What type of car? What year? Is it period? What street? What else is in the shot? Crowd? Extras? Day? Night? What is the man doing in the car? Does he drive up? Time has to be allowed to set up the shot and rehearse. Permits are required to shoot in the street. These details may not be critical to your scene, but writers have to think all the time about what they should specify and what they can leave up to the good judgment of the production people, mainly the director. As a general rule, be specific. However, to provide answers to all of the questions above would result in an unusable script, encumbered with unnecessary and unacceptable production detail.

There is a prevailing sentiment that everyone wants to get the script right before proceeding with production. To change a script involves work and expense. However, until there is agreement about this crucial document, it is difficult to advance the project. The script becomes the common denominator of a production to which everybody refers. Production people use the script to make budgets, schedules, sets, select a cast, and choose locations.

What is the Role of a Scriptwriter?

Because scripts are indispensable to production, writers are indispensable to the producers in the industry. This would seem to put writers in a powerful position. In practice, though, the scriptwriter seems to be the least valued contributor and the most abused.¹ Once a writer delivers a script and is paid, power to shape the end result wanes rapidly or even ceases. The producer and the director take control of the process. That is why the script must express a convincing vision and be a clear plan. Successful collaboration between a writer and director is the basis for good films and television programs. The producer’s role is to bring about such collaboration and make it possible by finding financial backing.

The “Script” Writer is a New Kind of Writer

The invention of the motion picture also brought about the need for a new kind of writer. In the early days of silent film, one-reelers and two-reelers were shot without scripts. The first writing job was to write the title cards and dialogue cards that were intercut with action scenes from time to time. More complex stories and longer films needed a scenario (the precursor of the treatment of today) that was written down by writers who could visualize and write action continuity.² Scenario, photoplay, photo-drama, now replaced by screenplay or script, were all new terms to describe this kind of writing. The new visual medium required a new kind of writing that described what was to be made visible on the screen. It had to describe the visual content of the frame or shot. It had to describe sequences of shots that would make narrative sense. It had to be a document that could be used as a plan for production. It required a visual writing. It required screenwriting. Seeing how early scriptwriters invented techniques and ways of writing for the screen tells us a lot about the problem.

Many of the early writers for the new medium were women. Anita Loos (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) wrote for D. W. Griffith and the Biograph Company. Margaret Turnbull, Beulah Marie Dix, and Marion Fairfax wrote for Famous Players-Lasky.³ Literary writers of novels and plays were recruited by William de Mille to dignify the vulgar image of movies with sometimes disastrous results because writers despised the medium and condescended to write mainly for the money.⁴ It seems clear that nobody really knew how to do this kind of writing. By the 1920s, the idea of writing for the movies had taken hold and many phony writing schools were advertising to the public: “No physical exertion required—invalids can succeed. Learn in five day’s time. Start to write immediately.”⁵ Very quickly the need for visual writing that translated to the screen and for writing that anticipated practical production realities led to a new writing profession.⁶ In the 1930s after the advent of sound, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences set about finding a standard form for the screenplay.

Everyone who tries to write for the moving picture medium and its derivatives goes through a personal evolution somewhat like the industry did. You learn about the problem of composing for a visual medium and struggle with finding a form in which to express it. You do not have to reinvent the wheel, just understand why the wheel was invented. Your job is to learn the conventions of the form and layout of a script that the industry has worked out by trial and error. If you do not follow these conventions, you set up barriers to having your work accepted.

What is Visual Writing?

Everybody has heard the old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words. Visual writing means making images stand for words. A clock face tells you time is passing. In the classic western High Noon (1952), the characters frequently look at the clock, and the audience sees a cutaway because the time left before the noon train is a powerful plot element. An outlaw recently released from prison and sworn to revenge is arriving on the noon train. The former marshal who put him in prison, just married and now in a dispute with his Quaker wife before they have even left on their honeymoon, desperately tries to recruit a posse but finally has to confront his enemy alone. Although visual writing for the screen involves description, it is not necessarily descriptive prose with a lot of adjectives. An image communicates both by logical deduction and emotional implication. A visual medium makes demands on both by using signs, symbols, and icons. You can tell the bad guys from the good guys in a Western without subtitles. Their hats, style of gun belt, clothes, and whether they are shaven or unshaven all let the audience know how to understand the character. Visual writing means writing and thinking with images that the audience will see, rather than words they will read.

How do you write with visual ideas as opposed to writing visually descriptive prose? We are all familiar with descriptive prose:

This visually descriptive opening to Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms is, no doubt, admirable prose fiction. However, it would not work for a film script. The freedom of the novelist to assemble impressions and condense impressions over time (written in the past tense) into a mood or atmosphere that is the setting for characters and action is hard to duplicate in film or television. It is barely conceivable that a moviemaker would reproduce all of these visual images, even in a montage. A scriptwriter cannot assume the freedom that the novelist has. A lot of descriptive imagery is irrelevant to the visual medium. If the nights are cold, saying so in the script does not translate onto the screen; to do so with a line of dialogue would be heavy handed. You have to show someone shivering or putting on a sweater—all very costly in screen time unless critical to the story.

The omniscient narrator is a novelistic device that is hard to duplicate in a screenplay unless you create a voice-over narrator. In a novel, the narration is verbalized. In a screenplay, it must disappear. Whether you are adapting an existing work or writing an original script, the imaginative challenge is to select a key setting and a key image. Do we choose the flashes of artillery at night? That would be quite demanding to shoot. A script can’t deal with the simile of comparing it to summer lightning. Do we choose the soldiers marching by raising dust with the crops, orchards, and mountains in the background? This is probably more concise cinematically and requires the right location. If we describe it too closely, the location search becomes impossible. Do we need to see the stream and the pebbles? Do we need to see the dust on the leaves? It is unrealistic for the writer to impose this kind of detail on the production. The director will resist when faced with the concrete task of choosing a location and a camera angle.

Essentially, the writer has to introduce action. This is true not only for movies and television, but also for corporate and instructional programs. The description that sets the scene is usually subordinate to character and action. The art is to combine them. Six pages on and some time later, Hemingway gets to a street scene with characters and interaction. On the seventh page, the first dialogue interchange between the narrator, a priest, Lieutenant Rinaldi, and a captain occurs in the mess hall. Two pages of dialogue in which the mood of war is introduced could easily take 5 or 10 minutes of screen time and a lot of money to create with lead actors, a crowd, sets, props, costumes, and locations. Yet by the end of Hemingway’s Chapter 2, we barely have a title sequence for a movie. Good novel! Bad script!

A scriptwriter has to invent a visual sequence that will condense background and action in such a way as to advance a story. This could be achieved by a number of devices.

Solution 1: Create an observer. A character could be riding a bike down the road with the scene in the background and the column of soldiers in the foreground. He arrives in the village. The street scene is established. Cut to the Mess Hall.

Solution 2: Create a montage. We see quick cuts from artillery flashes in the night. Cut to column of soldiers marching past. Quick cut to ambulance. Cut to civilians hiding from gunfire. Cut to ripe fruit in an orchard. Cut to Lieutenant Rinaldi in the Mess Hall.

Solution 3: Use audio to add value to the scene: Interior night, Mess Hall, Lieutenant Rinaldi, a captain and a priest in terse conversation with an American. Between phrases, the sound effect of an artillery exchange rattles the glass faintly from the shock wave of an explosion. Flashes of nearby artillery illuminate the faces near the windows.

Some screenwriters invent scenes in their adaptations that are not in the original work, or even change the plot, often to our great annoyance. Is it laziness? Is it legitimate adaptation? Sometimes, what works in a novel doesn’t work on screen. A novel can be hundreds of pages long. A feature film is a 120-odd pages of script for 100 minutes of screen times. As we saw earlier, there are plenty of ways to achieve the necessary economy of action. This linking of actions and condensing of actions is visual writing. We might be better off calling it writing with visual ideas. It works by narrating through a sequence of images. The scriptwriter has to think in terms of physical action because everything in a screenplay is seen on the screen. The scriptwriter’s job is to describe action as the camera sees it.

When screenwriter Ben Hecht adapted Hemingway’s novel for the movie of 1957, he adopted a narrative voice-over technique (see DVD).⁸ Lieutenant Frederic Henry sets the background of the story of the war as we see him return from leave. He walks past a military column of pack mules and a company of Italian troops against a backdrop of the village of Orsino and evidence of war damage. He gets a wave from a girl from the window of a brothel over a local bar before he enters the ambulance pool adjoining the hospital. Now we meet characters, and dialogue between them moves the plot along.

In the final analysis, the solution to adapting Hemingway may be to cut out this opening and start deeper into the story. At this point, you might decide you’d rather be a novelist. On the assumption that you are still open to scriptwriting as an option, let’s proceed.

Visual Writing

So the first understanding of visual writing entails writing for the media result, a description of what the audience will experience. There is another aspect to visual writing that I will call meta-writing. This writing, or perhaps this thinking (sometimes an unwritten concept) often determines the structure of media content. However, it is not necessarily the plot itself, nor the story; it is the visual idea that makes the content work for a given medium. It can be a dramatic conflict for a story, but it can also be the visual idea that makes a billboard work or a television commercial succeed. Often it requires a visual metaphor that carries the theme. It is usually embodied in the written creative concept.

To understand this better, let’s illustrate meta-writing. Titanic! As soon as you say the word, you conjure up a major ship wreck, tragic loss of life, survivors, all things that you can see. The love story in the film is a storyline and plot that is superimposed on the meta-writing. Jurassic Park! The genetic reconstruction of dinosaurs in an island theme park is a visual idea. The characters and the storyline are superimposed on it. Meta-writing has great importance in corporate communications, which often depend on finding a visual correlative for an abstract idea-change, for instance. Although change itself is an abstract idea, it can be understood through visual metaphors such as weather, a river, a speeded-up growth sequence of a plant, or speeded up sequence of decay. The DVD has a video clip for EMC Corporation on information flows and management. It is made comprehensible emotionally and intellectually by images of water in motion, such as waves, rivers, and waterfalls. So meta-writing is that writing or thinking that enables the writing of the key concept.

Where do We Go from Here?

We are ready to look at some of the specific problems of setting down the writer’s vision, namely, describing images and sound for production. We will learn how to do so in incremental steps. One way is to reverse engineer a scene from a movie or a television program. From your experience of seeing a scene, turn your role around and try to describe what a production crew would need to know to remake that scene. Even though you don’t yet know how to write scripts, trying to do so introduces you to the essential problem. This will start you thinking about how you describe things and how you lay out this information on a page.

A good way to approach this is to find a movie with a published script and study how the visuals on screen relate to the script. A word to the wise, however; published scripts are usually postproduction scripts, release scripts provided for dubbing foreign language versions or for publicity. They are made from the finished movie for distribution, dubbing, and publicity purposes. A postproduction script seldom corresponds word for word with the production script, and it is usually written by a person other than the scriptwriter.

Differences Compared to Stage Plays

Another way to isolate the special nature of scriptwriting is to compare it to play writing. Stage plays do not usually describe action in detail. Stage directors and designers have greater latitude to decide on the staging and the blocking. Stage plays assume a constant point of view based on the proscenium stage with a consistent sight line. The scriptwriter has to be concerned with physical action and a specific point of view anywhere within a 360-degree compass. Action must be described as it is framed by a camera lens and by a camera movement. The words spoken by characters, the dramatic dialogue, although part of the script, do not present a visual writing problem except perhaps when dialogue stops the action (see a discussion of this issue in Chapter 10).

Plays are not always visual and depend heavily on dialogue. Novels describe emotions. Visual media have to show emotions. So a script is not a novel though it may be adapted from a novel. It is not a play though it is sometimes adapted from a play and becomes a screenplay. It is a unique form. A screenplay and many shorter scripts can be original, not based on a source work. A writer can also write or compose directly for the visual medium.⁹ Although visual writing means thinking in terms of images rather than describing visual things, visual writing also means leaving out obvious and unnecessary scenes no matter how visual. The scriptwriter has to construct visual meaning out of sequences of images whether he is communicating a corporate message or adapting Hemingway. Original visual writing for a script means doing this in your head.

Writing With Dialogue

Colin Welland wrote an original script, Chariots of Fire, produced by David Puttnam, about two British runners, Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams, who competed in the Olympic Games of 1924. Chariots of Fire won the Academy Award for best picture in 1982. Here is the scene of a college race in which we meet Abrahams, a main character. Welland introduces the theme of running and competition and establishes the social setting and the social class of the characters in this Cambridge University setting.

EXT. TRINITY COURT MID-DAY

HAROLD MOVE FORWARD. A HUSH DESCENDS ON THE COURT. THE CROWD CRANE

THEIR NECKS AS HAROLD TOES THE LINE TO FIND THE BEST GRIP.

A VOICE CUTS IN

ALL HEADS TURN—TO SEE, HURRYING THROUGH THE CROWD, HIS COAT THROWN OVER HIS SHOULDER ANDY LINDSEY. CROOKED IN HIS ARM IS AN UNOPENED BOTTLE OF CHAMPAGNE. HAROLD IS AS AMAZED AS THE REST. ANDY TOSSES HIS COAT TO THE OPEN MOUTHED AUBREY AND THE BOTTLE TO HARRY. HE’S RESPLENDENT IN ETON RUNNING STRIPE.

CHEERS AGAIN.¹⁰

The dialogue, although natural to the characters, advances the plot. The description is necessary to the action. It also sets up an action scene, which creates interest and anticipation for the audience.

Writing Without Dialogue

Consider the opening of Bartleby, a contemporary adaptation of the story Bartleby, The Scrivener by Herman Melville. The images establish an urban setting, the anonymity, alienation, and isolation of the main character.

INT. TUBE TRAIN -- DAY

BARTLEBY is sitting next to the window in silhouette. Light rain streaks past the window as the train flashes past London suburbs.

The train plunges underground. Fade in Music.

CUT TO:

INT. TUBE STATION -- DAY

A train arrives in the station and stops. People pour out across the platform. In the middle, we catch a glimpse of BARTLEBY.

CUT TO:

INT. TUBE ESCALATOR -- DAY

Side shot from parallel escalator descending of BARTLEBY riding up the escalator. He is motionless. The background moves by.

CUT TO:

INT. TUBE ESCALATOR -- DAY

LS of BARTLEBY, one of a line of people riding up escalator. MS BARTLEBY. He is motionless. Most of them are looking straight ahead. BARTLEBY looks towards camera as it descends past him.

CUT TO:

INT. TUBE STATION -- DAY

CAMERA TRACKS and PANS past a long bank of 24 hour lockers coming upon BARTLEBY putting a bag into a locker at chest height.

DISSOLVE TO:¹¹

This visual sequence without dialogue is the cinematic equivalent of novelistic description. Cinematic description is often implied by the setting, crowd, action, and movement of the camera. All good scriptwriters try to write with images and show action.

Some scriptwriting is down to earth. Here is a description of a shipping sequence from a corporate video:

MONTAGE OF 55-foot Truck and trailer backing up to a loading bay, hand signals between driver and bay. Forklift loads the Truck. Securing for the journey. Shutting the trailer door.

This is not inspired prose. It just describes essential action. What it looks like on screen will be decided by the director on location, by the placement of the camera, and by the chance availability of certain trucks and forklifts. Scriptwriting is primarily an art of organizing images to tell a story or communicate a message.

Conclusion

In this chapter, we have looked at adapting existing material and inventing original dramatic writing. Starting with an examination of something familiar, namely movies, reveals some of the ways that scriptwriting is different from writing prose. A later chapter deals with more of these issues. There are many other kinds of scriptwriting. Some have particular page formats governed by production methods such as multicamera live production. All scriptwriting involves clear description. A hundred years of development since the beginning of motion pictures have led to techniques of writing and a specific camera and audio vocabulary to help do the job. You need to learn these recognized conventions for describing certain recurring visual frames. This requires a chapter of its own.

Exercises

1. Write your description of a short scene from a TV series or a movie so that another production crew could recreate that same scene. Invent your own way of writing a one-page script.

2. Look at a video of a film with a published script and read the script while you study the video. Start by using a silent film, say, a Charlie Chaplin film such as Gold Rush. Here are a few movie titles for which you can find a postproduction script: Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Taxi Driver, and The Piano Player.

   

3. Select a scene from a Shakespeare play or any other play, by Bernard Shaw or Henrik Ibsen, for instance. Then identify what would not be clear for film production. What do you have to add to make a film or television sequence? Can you use all of the dialogue? Do not write a script; instead write an analysis of what would have to change or be added to adapt it to film.

   

4. Write a present time action description for the opening chapter of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Decide how to condense the action. Make a list of shots describing visuals only. Set yourself an objective of no more than three minutes of screen time.

   

5. Write a present time action description of the opening of a movie adaptation of J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. Make a list of shots describing visuals only. Decide what screen time will work.

6. Compare a book you have read with the movie based on it. See if you can identify a key scene in the movie that wasn’t in the book. Analyze why! Also look for a scene in the book that wasn’t in the movie. Analyze why! Find a scene that is in both and examine how the adaptation has worked.

7. As an exercise in visual writing, try to create an image or a one-shot scene that communicates primary emotional situations: anger, fear, humor, curiosity, conflict, danger, deceit, hope, fatigue. The challenge is to show it without words and without literal-minded solutions such as a close-up of an angry face for anger.