This week we were assigned the Adam Ganz reading “‘To Make you see’: Screenwriting, description and the ‘lens-based’ tradition” for the Another World studio. The reading attempts to contextualize screenwriting as a descriptive art. Ganz asserts that screenwriting is describing what will be then interpreted through a lens, therefore setting it aside from other forms of prose writing.
Ganz refers to Galileo’s description of seeing the moon through a telescope, almost the opposite of the screenwriting process, which is a description of events that will be transported into a visual medium (Ganz 2013, p. 14). Ganz further mentioned scientific writing by mentioning written work referencing the scientist Leeuwenhoek and his work describing elements through a microscope (Ganz 2013 p. 15-16). This focus on lens based writing was then related to travel writing. I found that this connection to screenwriting weaker as describing settings doesn’t necessarily require the same interpretation skills. I did relate, however to the importance of perspective when writing. This is especially prevalent in the novel writing section, as Ganz mentions the colonial perspective when referring to Robinson Crusoe. This highlights the inherent bias in relating information in the written form, and how description can be gendered, or relate a particular point of view for the audience or reader. The different between the travel or novel writing and scientific description is that scientific writing is more neutral and contains balanced description, as opposed to writing for a novel which aims to present a particular agenda or situation in a certain light.
Overall, I found the reading interesting. I could relate the reading to our coursework, in that we are aiming to create a storyworld. Awareness of the medium in which the world will exist is essential in using the correct language to successful transfer this world from the written page to the desired medium. This involves understanding the limitations and audience expectations of the form.
Reference
Ganz, A 2013 “‘To Make you see’: Screenwriting, description and the ‘lens-based’ tradition”, Journal of Screnwriting, vol. 1, no. 4, pp. 7-24.
