This week’s task was more of making a more interesting short the short prose that the creative writing students had filmed. We were given tasks to write any interesting ideas that popped into our heads. For example, how would you act out the certain dialogue that was used or how to improve on the stage blocking. This exercise helped me open up my eyes on different possibilities of acting our a certain line from the short prose. I chose the “in danger” prose. When the mob boss said “let’s just say I’m taking care of business” I could imagine the mob boss being mysterious and they did not show his/her face at all or maybe an angrier approach of reciting that line because the minions did not trust him. Endless possibilities on the idea of filming and framing the shots.
On Thursday’s workshop, I had a valuable insight on scriptwriting. Stacey, our collaborative lecturer, had given me a few tips on scriptwriting. We had a glimpse on the script of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. The most important thing to keep in mind when writing a script is the tenses. Scripts are discarded the minute they see wrong tenses in describing the actions. The ‘to be’ verbs are usually disregarded. For example, we are not to use ‘is striding’ as ‘strides’ would be the proper tense to use in describing the action. The reason is because film catches the action as it is and not what would happen. I find this intriguing because when I think of describing an action I would use ‘to be’ tenses because I would be explaining to the casts how we would portray the action. A lesson to remember!
Another important tip on writing the action section of the script is to describe only the action that we can see while filming. If you do a background description of the character, it is useless because viewers can’t visualise the description. The action section cannot be about the psychological aspect of a character either because no one can understand what is happening to the character unless a monologue is used. Also, no use of the pronoun ‘we’, because the viewers are not to be mentioned in the script.
A great idea on improving one’s skill on scriptwriting is to be able to spot these mistakes on other scripts. This can give me a visualisation and understanding on the rules of scriptwriting and not make the same mistakes. A great tip to improve my scriptwriting!