A SCREENPLAY WAITS FOR THE CAMERA

Prompt: I learned something in the studio that highlighted my previous experience/lack of previous experience with screenwriting…

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On a scale from ‘I have never read or touched a screenplay in my life’ to ‘I have decades of screenwriting experience and have won many accolades for said screenwriting’, I’m a solid ‘I know what screenplays look like but I’ve never written – or at least don’t remember ever writing – one.’

This then leads to the question: How much do I know about screenwriting?

Because I have read screenplays and on occasion tried to make something from a screenplay but have I picked up anything about the art of screenwriting from these experiences? Or were they nothing more than just words on a page to me?

I’ll freely admit that I’m leaning towards the latter. Not because of a lack of interest in screenplays and screenwriting but more because my focus was on other things. In the past, I usually just let the director read it and then do whatever they tell me to do with the camera. Whenever I have read scripts, it’s usually because I’m only interested in the story. I never looked at the the more intricate details of screenwriting.

We’ve only looked at the basics of screenwriting during these first two classes but that alone has already expanded my knowledge. There are some things we have looked that I genuinely did not know. However, what was most interesting to me were the things that were obvious about screenwriting but, upon rediscovering them, made me look at screenwriting in a different light.

In the reading by Robert McKee, he mentions that a screenplay differs from something like a book because it isn’t a complete work within itself. When a book is finished, it is finished. However, when one finishes writing a script, the script is passed on to the next phase of filmmaking.

‘A screenplay waits for the camera’.

This quote from McKee struck me. It is something we all inherently seem to know. Whether you are just a casual fan of movies or if you are the one creating the movies, it is just an accepted fact of life that the script is created before – and for – the audiovisual product we see on our screens. It struck me because in simply knowing this little fact, your whole approach to writing can change. I imagine that writing with the knowledge that your words are going to be interpreted on screen will make you write differently than writing knowing that your words will be read on the same page on which you write.

A small example of this would be this blog post. I know this isn’t going to be turned into an audiobook so I need to make my tone and inflection clear through other means. I use italics (or parenthesis) to emphasise sections where I want the tone to be clear. In a similar way, knowing your script will become a movie might make you reconsider the way you describe your scenes. And this, I realise, is exactly what this studio is all about.

I obviously haven’t put this knowledge into screenwriting practice yet but I like how I have been able to find a clear difference for myself between screenwriting and literary writing. If I hadn’t done this, I probably would’ve started off writing a whole novella and tried to pass it off as a screenplay. It’s good knowledge to begin with and I will definitely utilise it as I step into this world of screenwriting.