The Purpose
Although this textbook is intended mainly for students in colleges and universities who are taking their first course in writing scripts for media, it is also intended for all writers making the transition to writing for visual media. It assumes that the reader begins with minimal understanding of the nature of writing for visual media. Most beginners have had a large number of experiences viewing visual media: films, television, and video. They probably contemplate the originating creative act that lies behind such programs without much idea of how it’s done. They may not understand visual thinking, or if they do, they don’t know how to set it down. They don’t know formats. In short, they don’t know where or how to start. This textbook is designed to get the beginner started. It is not intended to make fully fledged professionals out of beginners, nor to deal with every type of media writing, nor all the issues of scriptwriting, but it does cover all the material a beginner will need to write viable scripts in the main media formats.
This text is meant to be introductory. Other books offer more exhaustive and more specialized information about how to work at a professional level writing for film, television, corporate video, or interactive media. Broadcast journalism for current affairs and sports is another discipline that is well covered in more specialized works. At the end of the book, you will find a selected bibliography containing many of these more advanced books that focus more narrowly on a special type of writing for a single medium together with more general works, and the sources quoted or referenced in the chapters that follow.
The Premise of this Book
This book is based on the premise that the fundamental challenge arises in learning to think and to write visually, that a script is a plan for production, and that visual media are identifiably different from print media. Although broadcast journalism overlaps visual writing in some of its forms, other journalistic concerns about sources, objectivity, and editorial issues dominate. Shaping a news story delivered to a teleprompter does not require visual writing. Therefore, this form of scripting is excluded.
Although writing for the audio track has been part of the job of scriptwriting since sound was added to motion pictures some seventy years ago, writing for the ear alone concerns only words that are to be heard rather than words to describe a visual experience on screen. Our focus is a body of technique that is concerned with writing for audiovisual media that are based on sequencing images. Writing for radio, with the exception of a show like Prairie Home Companion on National Public Radio, usually consists of writing radio ads, which are a form of copywriting and, therefore, guided by advertising concerns, or it is news and involves the journalistic issues already mentioned. Therefore, writing purely for radio is limited to radio PSAs as an adjunct to visual PSAs. However, in context, writing dialogue, voice-over narration, and other audio concerns are given the importance they deserve.
Objectives
To become good at your craft, sooner or later you need to specialize. You need to hone and refine your writing skills for the way in which a particular medium is used. This does not mean you can never cross over from one form to another, but the chances are that if you are going to make a living writing for a visual medium, you will have to be good enough in at least one area to compete with the pros already practicing the craft. That is a few stages away.
To get there from here you need to learn:
- How visual media communicate
- Visual thinking
- Visual writing
- Scriptwriting terminology
- The recognized script format for each visual medium
- A method to get from brain static to a coherent idea for any media script
- The role of the writer in media industries.
Secondary Objectives
Even if you don’t end up writing for a living, you may have a job that requires you to read, interpret, evaluate, buy, or review scripts. There are dozens of activities that require you to be able to evaluate the written plan that is the script. The script is cheap to produce compared to producing the script. You may need to be able to construe the final product from words and ideas on a page.
Some of the people who have to do this are producers, directors, story editors, literary agents, studio and TV executives, film and video editors, and actors. Other positions in the visual communications industry might also require that you be able to read a script and deduce what it will take to make a product that can be seen by an audience. In addition to the people who have to evaluate and buy or reject scripts, these positions include art directors, set designers, talent agents, casting directors, lighting directors, and sound designers. Virtually anyone who has a role in bringing a script to the screen needs to be able to read the blueprint from which a program is made.
So even if you don’t succeed specifically as a scriptwriter, you still need to understand scriptwriting and what makes a script work well. You must be able to follow the way a script translates into narrative images that communicate to an audience. You must be able to read the coded set of instructions that a script embodies.
The Basic Idea of a Script
If a musician wants someone else to play his music, he must write it down as notes in a form that other musicians can read, decode, and then turn back into music. This problem has been solved in the music world by inventing the musical staff, treble and bass, with a clear set of rules for describing what pitch, what loudness, and what rhythm should be reproduced. Even composers who don’t write music need arrangers to write it out for them because most music involves groups of musicians playing different instruments simultaneously. There is always a barrier between the page of music and the auditory experience of hearing the music. You can’t hear the score unless you are a trained musician. Even then, you need to play the notes to understand what the composer intended and create a musical experience for a wide audience, most of whom cannot read music or play an instrument.
Likewise, you can’t see the script for a film or a video. If you are a trained director or editor who knows how to read a script, you can visualize in your mind’s eye what is intended just as the musician can hear in his mind’s ear what the music should sound like. You can translate a static page into a sequence of images flowing in a time line. Today’s nonlinear video editors display programs in a graphic time line, which is a kind of storyboard metaphor for the content of a program. In the end, the production process is needed to make the script into images that are accessible to all viewers who cannot read a script, nor frame a shot, nor edit a sequence to make narrative sense.
Like all analogies, this one breaks down. Musical scores are used over and over again for numberless performances, whereas a script is used only once. So another useful analogy is the blueprint, the drawings an architect makes for a builder or contractor to erect a building. After the building is finished, the blueprint has little interest except perhaps for maintenance or repair. The people who buy the house, or live in it, may not be able to read the plans any more than the audience at a concert is able to read music or an audience for a film is able to read a script. The home dweller hardly thinks about the plans of the house, even though this person may have strong views about how successful the building is to inhabit. If you like living in the space, then that is a measure of the building’s success.
Likewise, if you watch a TV series, like a movie, or understand a corporate message, you don’t think about the scripts on which they are based. You get an audiovisual, intellectual, and emotional experience. You laugh, cry, reflect, or go into a rewarding imaginative or mental space. So a script has little value except as a blueprint to make something. Think of it this way. You couldn’t sell many scripts of Star Wars or Jurassic Park (name your favorite movie), but you can sell a lot of tickets to see the movie made from it—millions of tickets in fact.
The Learning Task
Your job right now is to begin to understand how you put this plan, this score, this blueprint for a movie together. Whether it is a public service announcement, a corporate communication, or a feature film, you have to figure out the process. You have to learn in what forms media industries communicate, buy, sell, and produce their ideas. You have to try it out before big bucks or your next month’s rent are at stake.
The most difficult part of writing is the constant revision. The fact is that we have to rewrite and revise until we get it right. Writers whose work you watch on TV and in the movie theater have spent a long time studying how it’s done. One day, I was explaining this to a communications student who played on the college basketball team. I asked him what the coach had him do in basketball practice. His eyes lit up and he described some of the shooting drills. Then I asked him what he thought the equivalent drills would be for a writer. He wasn’t so sure, and did not understand that a similar degree of practice is the foundation for successful writing.
We need to think about how we can score some points in this writing game. If you have to shoot thousands of baskets so as to be able to sink a foul shot, let’s think about what it takes to get to be good enough to score consistently in a competitive writing game. Some people will put in a lot of time practicing basketball because they love the game. Scriptwriters keep writing because they love the medium and they love to create. Isn’t it the same idea? Practice, practice, practice! Don’t give up! Don’t get discouraged when your ideas don’t work out right away, and, above all, enjoy the creative act, even if you don’t make points every time!
Using the DVD
This text is designed to work in tandem with a DVD. Interactive computer technology provides us with a new opportunity, hitherto impossible to achieve in a textbook, to link script blueprint and resultant image in the visual medium itself. Although the printed book contains some examples of scripts, the DVD provides many more and also more complete scripts. Script samples are frequently linked to finished video clips on the DVD. It also provides a visual glossary of script vocabulary for camera shots and movements. An icon has been placed throughout the text whenever the DVD is referenced. The interactive navigation is modeled on the chapter outline so that all the links for a given chapter are accessible under the heading for that chapter. There are also other options for interactive navigation that follow themes or topics. Demos of scripting software, which is now indispensable to the professional writer, can also be found via active links on the DVD so that you can download trial versions of some of them.
Conclusion
This book is about learning the fundamentals of scriptwriting. It is designed to take you from nowhere to somewhere, from no experience and no knowledge to a basic level of competence and knowledge of what the issues of scriptwriting are. It gives you a chance to explore your visual imagination and try out your powers of invention. Later, you can confront the full range of writing issues particular to each genre in each medium by taking more advanced media writing courses dedicated to specific media formats, or by reading more advanced texts, or by further self-directed writing experience.
In the end, you learn, not by reading, not by thinking , and not by talking about doing it, but by doing it. “Just do it!,” as the Nike ad says. Write!