Last name question (i promise!)

Officer 1 & Officer 2 - if you're using the same non-main character actors.

If they're different, then just use two police officers... In the credits they'll all be listed as Police Officers: ...

Paradis said:

Sorry for all the name questions lately. I'm just finding in this new script I'm writing, I'm coming across alot of new scenarios, and they're ones that I'm finding vary or aren't the same from script to script

This one has to do with when you've got a type of extra/unimportant character, and distinguishing them.

An easy example would be say Policemen. In one scene earlier you may have a couple of nameless policemen appear.. TWO OFFICERS enter the room with flashlights...
while later on a scene will call for another couple of Policemen though they're just as unimportant/unidentified. Yet as far as I know, it's important not to clutter the script with names that are the same (TWO OFFICERS) as that will only confuse people, or make for potential mistakes in production etc etc.

How does one address this? Just number them off throughout the script? even if you're at #8, 9, 10 etc?

sigh, I'm sure you're all rolling your eyes at the green-ness of all this nonesense.

Click to expand...

This is the sort of thing that we all come across every so often and actually -- unless you're dealing with characters that actually speak -- who cares?

So there are THREE COPS in scene one and FIVE COPS in scene twenty three and A COP in scene forty and AN ARMY OF COPS in scene fifty two.

So you've got a lot of background cops that don't have any other identifying feature other than that they're cops. Sometimes that happens.

Unless, for some reasons, particular cops come far enough into the foreground to say something or do something that warrants identifying them specifically -- there's no point in doing it.

And if there is, numbering them, as a rule, is not the ideal way to do it, because it's the least memorable way to identify a character, especially if they've got more than a line.

It's better if the cop or the "whatever" has some identifying quality, whether physical or emotional "ANGRY COP" or TOUGH COP or whatever, that allows the reader to get some sense of him -- even if it's only for the few lines and the few moments that he's present in the scene.

As for numbering these nameless characters for production purposes -- again, if and when a script reaches production -- they'll actually figure out how many different cops there are in the script overall.

NMS