Rainy Night said:
I knew the Pink Fairy would have an answer.
Gracias
Indeed, the Pink Fairy did good.
One other point should perhaps be made, however, and that is how you might do some specifying at the outset or in the early moments that sets up how your titles and supered text will appear, and even a global cue for them you can use throughout. This approach is usually a good deal more economic, it reduces repetitious text.
Let's see, how to do this ...
FADE IN:
EXT SETTING - DAY (ESTABLISHING)
Blah, blah, blah, blah describe the setting.
SUPER:
"[SETTING'S NAME]"
TITLE:
CGI FX L/R frame: DATE and TIME readout, as though typed on a keyboard.
We'll use these conventions throughout but sans the cues.
EXT HIGHWAY THROUGH SETTING - NIGHT
[end example]
From here on you can avoid writing or including the words "SUPER" and/or "TITLE" (the cues) and just write, where needed:
"[WHATEVER TEXT YOU WISH SUPERED]"
(centered on the page of course), and, where appropriate,
CGI FX L/R frame: [whatever text you wish to exhibit].
If your script was 75 pages and you averaged even one need of supered text per page you'd save yourself (3 * 75 =) 225 lines, which by my count would be four pages, a not insignificant savings.
And, it would be more if you put text in the lower right hand corner of the frame several times as well.
Each entry in its conflated form saves you three lines and one word; if you use both forms, that's six lines and two words per pair.
Two words may not seem like much but you would be reducing their reptitition by some significant margin, perhaps as many as 100 or more times.
Any time you can save your reader the hassle of reading the same word a hundred times, seems to me you got to go for it. There's enough repetitious text as it is.
This technique is not unheard of, writers long ago figured out its value in terms of economy. We do a similar thing when we attribute some trait or habit to a character,
"Millie chews her nails, as she will throughout."
This precludes the necessity of writing "Millie chews her nails" 100 times or whatever in the script. She's always chewing her nails.
You could likely find a more elegant way of writing your setup, I just grabbed something out of the air. But in effect you want something that's equivalent to "Millie chews her nails, as she will throughout," only it's something like "This is the way we'll cue supered text and we'll do it throughout."
Same diff.
Of course it would not be worth the effort if you were only going to declare TITLE or SUPER: a few times, no economizing to be had there.
But if you expect you'll be declaring supered text every page or so, the ecomizing could be big!
Cheers!
