clock_work9 said:
But it is different from the way the industry works. You said yourself, all shooting scripts will have day/night sluglines in their scene headings. Presumably you are hoping to get to the shooting script stage one day so why not present your work like you mean it? For clarity? Clarity isn't necessarily about making your pages whiter. It's about making sure the correct information is present to ensure a smooth read.
I don't write shooting scripts.
My sensitivity is to a readers needs, not a production situation's needs. The difference is insufficient to cause concern. My script looks just like all the orhers when you pick it off the pile and riff its pages. You don't really notice the differenecs until you start reading and then they're so subtle you may not become consciously aware of them for some number of pages, or maybe even never. At the end you might flash,
gee that was a nice smooth ride! Your eyes may not be as tired as they usually are after a two hour plus read ... because I have reduced their workload, granted not by much, but every little bit helps and, if you've applied all the other techniques we know about, you might just get something a reader has not experienced very often. If that lands your work in the "consider" pile, you've hit the homer you need to hit ... and which if you don't hit, you're sunk.
Spec scripts that are greenlighted get rewritten into a shooting script by a story department guy, usually in conjunction with a production manager and the lead d-guy or perhaps even an assignned director.
clock_work9 said:
I think you're wrong to say it's not open to misinterpretation. Like dpat said, what if a particular day goes on for a few pages? Is it not easier to have 'Day' in every scene heading, lest the reader forget and have to skim back to find out? And can you honestly say that every single reader working in the industry would know it was your intent to leave these things off? I wouldn't.
They know because they recognize the convention I'm using.
Different strokes for different folks.
Sometimes there are indeed many pages that run in DAY and/or NIGHT without change. If my reader stops and asks herself, wait a minute, is it DAY or is it NIGHT? they'll realize almost instantly that the last thing they read about time of day said it was DAY and since they've read nothing since to alter that, right now it must be DAY!
Wolla! It's a very simple perception.
These kinds of things are comon enough that most readers do indeed recognize them when they encounter them. Readers talk among themselves and discuss things they've run into the first time; they ask questions, they learn what accepted practices are, and the practice I use is indeed accepted, has been for years.
Will every writer use it? No. Matt Damon and Ben Affleck used a lot of "MORNINGS and "EVENINGS" and "AFTERNOONS" in their script
"Good Will Hunting," some writers go the more formal route and use DAY and/or NIGHT on every caption, there's a half a dozen variations on the theme. They're all acceptable, mainly because their differences are so subtle. From two feet away they all look the same.
I'm just optimizing my chances and I been doing this long enough to probably have that fairly well clocked in. Consistency is the key. If you do it the same way throghout, a reader can handle just about any convention you throw at them. They know that writers have their own ways and wish to be identifiable by them. It's part of your writing voice.
Oh yeah, he's one of those guys that don't use periods.
clock_work9 said:
OK, if you say so. Although I can't honestly imagine that 'day' or 'night' would take longer than a thirtieth of a second to read. But who knows? Maybe it does take less time to read. I suppose by taking out all those pesky day and nights, you can pack a lot more story in.
It isn't just them, you're right, they don't amount to much; but what counts is the
net or
cumulative effect of
everything you've done to optimize the read. If I shave ten minutes off, that makes a difference, and not so much in terms of the time but the feeling of it, the perception, the hit. You wanna make a reader feel good, not all grumpy.
Think for a moment about scene transitions, which are right justified, que no? Yes, they are. Ever wonder why? Well, that justification is purposeful, it is done because the natural place the eye ends up in the closing of the preceding scene is at the right, not always but almost always, way over there on the right. If all you need do is drop your eye a line to read the transition, it's a more natural and hence less energy consuming form. Read right, drop down, go left, read right, go left ...
This is done for reability, nothing else.
I want my script to be ultimately readable, smooth as glass, a breeze, nothing in the way, or as little as practicable. I also do not use "(CONT)" on the second part of a split speech, either, nor do I cap SOUNDS or PROPS or anything much save for a character's name when they are introduced. Caps make a read go all jiggy. Once in a great while I'll use a "KABOOM!" or a "POW!" or a "THUD," but these are generally rare.
Simplicity is elegance.
clock_work9 said:
Look, if this particular method works for you, great. I won't try to stop you and I respect your decision. But it's not something I'd do and I wouldn't advise others to do it for one very simple reason...
Panic Room takes place all in one night, in one house. Check out the script. Early draft, btw, not shooting. Aside from the beginning which takes place during the day, every scene heading has 'Night' at the end of it? Why? What's the point? Because that's just the way it is. There are plenty of Hollywood-isms that defy logic, that make us mad, that seem pointless but we do them because it is expected of us and because at the end of the day, that's how scripts are written.
Check out the two scene headings below. Which one looks like it was penned by someone who knows how scripts are written?
INT. APARTMENT - DAY
INT APARTMENT
No contest, surely?
No, the second version looks and reads better to me. And I'll tell ya, it is so common as to not cause a single raised eyebrow.
clock_work9 said:
Yet, not as commonly accepted as leaving them in in the first place!
The difference is so insignificant it isn't a cause for concern; it is sufficiently common to raise no eyebrows.
clock_work9 said:
This reads like a huge double standard to me. You quite rightly are telling us that you shouldn't do anything to piss off a reader. Why doesn't your list include "Doing things differently from virtually every professionally-written script out there?" What if your script ends up in the hands of a reader who thinks like me? What if your script is rejected for such a superficial reason? There's no way your script would be rejected for including them so is it not safer just to leave them in?
My bet is if you tried it you'd like it, and so far I've not lost that bet.
But I have to stress that the differences are cognitively insignificant, they are much more subsconscious in effect, how a reader
feels when they reach "THE END."
Hey, we're all gambling.
But the form evolves too, go back and read some scripts form the 60's or 70's, in those days every character in the scene was declared in the scene caption,
EXT SALOON - DAY (HARVEY, MOE, JILL, LESTER)
We don't do this anymore, nor do we use MORES and CONTINUEDS (well, some do I think).
Robert Towne tried to introduce a new convention when he placed a period two spaces
outside the left margin at the lead of every paragraph he saw as an ANGLE. This can be seen in early drafts of
"Chinatown," although the periods have been removed from later editions of that script. A few other writers of the time picked it up and used it too, a very subtle change that was a direct commo with the script's director,
this paragraph is a shot. But it didn't catch on and soon disappeared. Guys try stuff all the time, a lot of this is born in film schools.
It is also true that studios all have their own format and standards of convention, so that if you get an assignment to write something for Paramount you'd better use their style guide; Disney, you better use there's, and so on. I'm fully prepared to do this, make no mistake, and in fact have done it.
clock_work9 said:
Great news about your recent 'consider.' Hope it goes well for you with all sincerity.
Thank you, we've got our fingers crossed, but you know how it is, ya get a hundred reads and maybe sell one option, if you're lucky.
And all of this is really over some pretty minor stuff. My scripts look just like all the others except their pages strike as being just a tad cleaner and less cluttered than most, many folks never become consciously aware of this or they might get just a niggling feeling about it ... until at page 66 it hits them and they realize
why the pages seem so clean and uncluttered.
None of us will ever do it exactly like the next guy, look what Shane Black managed to pull off, or Quentin Tarantino. Look at "stacked" action lines, look at "read through" slugs. There is variation on the theme, as long as it doesn't go
clunk! we'll be cool. Just don't go clunk.
Keep churning!
