IF IT AIN'T IN THE SCRIPT, IT AIN'T

Audiences go to movies to experience situations and sensations that will generate strong emotional reactions and insights. The structure, the characters and the conflict of the script must engage the audience and give them a revealing insight into the human spirit. A great script moves the audience along with a series of compelling visual elements (a picture is worth a thousand words) and uses the dialogue to glue the pictures together. This is true even if your movie never makes it any further than the net. You must engage the audience!

While motion picture film can capture the hundreds of thousands of subtle shifts in expression that echo pages of dialogue, the script destined to be shot in video must convey these thoughts more through speech and gesture. The greatest challenge for the digital scriptwriter is to create a boldness of action that treads the delicate balance between too much and not enough.

Where a film script would normally rely on dialogue primarily to express thoughts and the actor's craft to express feeling, the digital script needs to incorporate subtle emotional indicators into the dialogue. Don't tell them what the character's feeling but perhaps elaborate on the peripheral motivations involved.

A 35mm feature can afford to spend time showing the audience around, getting them used to the environment and basically feeding them eye candy. You can't. Get down to business, get them involved and do it quickly. If you haven't sucked the audience into your world in the first few minutes chances are very good, unless you've got a real barn burner of a script, that you won't be able to reel'em in at all.

Recomended reading: Christopher Vogler's THE WRITER'S JOURNEY or Michael Halperin's, WRITING THE SECOND ACT.

There are precious few scripts floating around this town that aren't crammed full of at least a dozen of the most banal CLICHES you can imagine. Perhaps this list could be of help.