Methinks you have to keep it up -- you're telling whoever's reading the script how many breakdowns and setups they need (moving crew and equipment to new locations). That's besides telling a good story, natch!
-Derek
Personally, when I've got scenes that move rapidly back and forth between the interior and exterior of a car -- say it's a car driving down a highway during a chase scene and the action is moving constantly between the inside of the car where various things are happening and outside, where other various things are happening -- I tend to use INT/EXT -- THE CAMARO ON THE INTERSTATE - DAY
And I'll then divide up significant actions in blocks of text -- but I'm not going to start writing in dozens of slug lines or even mini-slug lines.
What you're saying is true -- ultimately. But what you also have to realize is that when you're dealing with something like cars on roads the associated *production* decisions are going to be made, presuming they ever are, very far down the line -- and thus the decisions about how the actual sequence is going to be broken out is almost never going to have anything to do with how you break it out, presuming you do, on the page.
Are the highway exteriors involving your actors going to be the same highway exteriors used in the long shots -- shot in the same city, anywhere close to the same time?
It may very well be that anything that's not a close shot in through the car window is going to be shot with a second unit in one city at one time while the closer angles are going to be shot in a different city or a different country at a completely different time, while the interiors of the car may be shot at that time, or they may be shot as process shots at a completely different time.
Who knows? All that may depend on which city or which state or which country is giving the best tax rebates.
If a second unit is ultimately involved, all the stuff involving that unit is likely going to be storyboarded and drawn out so they know exactly what shots they need and they won't even refer back to the script.
Likewise, a director, in consultation with the production manager, is going to work out an actual shot list for a sequence like that and they're going to figure out -- what shots do they need outside the car -- how are they going to get them, what shots do they need inside the car -- how are they going to get them. Do they need a second unit?
All that stuff gets worked out on paper, budgeted in dollars and day out days and they figure out how to make it work -- and they don't go back and look at the script to see -- well, it says here, "INT. CAR" and says here, "EXT. CAR" -- so we need to go inside the car here and outside the car here.
By the time the project has reached that stage they will have gone into so much greater detail than can ever be attained in any screenplay, that those kinds of instructions have really been left behind. A production manager looks at that kind of scene and knows that an eighth of a page of INT/EXT car chase on highway (or whatever it is) isn't quite the same as an eighth of a page of INT. LIVING ROOM -- Jane and Bob talking.
The point is -- that's their business.
What we're trying to do, at the stage at which we're writing a spec script, is to write the most exciting and interesting and readable *sales* document that we can.
It isn't, at the stage at which we're writing, a production document. Ultimately, if it sells, there are changes that get made as it becomes *integrated* into other production-centered documents like budgets and shot lists and day-out-of days.
But unless we're also directing or producing -- we're not going to be part of that.
NMS
