changing clothes

This is a prime example of when it's okay to tell, not show.

You can do it in a thought:

He was glad he'd taken the time to pull on an extra pair of socks.

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or in a little action tell:

They packed up the gear as quickly as possible, pulling on their climbing clothes in record time.

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Or in dialogue:

"Hurry up people. There's no time to change your undies, just pull on a sweater and let's go!"

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Thinking of your question brings up one of my own. What about pooping?

Ziljon,

Your examples seem more like they'd be suited for a novel than a screenplay. We generally don't do "thoughts" in a screenplay, unless they are the voice-over thoughts being recited outloud by a character, something heavilly frowned upon.


Meanwhile, I recently saw It Happened One Night for the VERY first time, and I was stunned at the following clothes changing improbability. She jumped off her father's yacht while wearing her pajamas to flee from his control. And she swam to shore in those pajamas while her father dispatched all his servants to try and bring her back. How she swam ashore in her pajams, I'll never know[/Groucho]. Then the next time we see her, it is presumably the same day (maybe the next day, not made clear) and she's somehow escaped the wiles of her father's detectives, and we see her wearing a lovely suit-dress and carrying luggage, and she's in the bus station,perfectly fry and ehr hair impecably groomed. She's waiting in the shadows while an old lady buys her bus ticket for her (she is hiding in the background because she knows her wealthy father will have private investigators watching the ticket booth). Where the heck did the wet pajamas go? Where did the dress come from? Where did she change from the wet pajamas into the dress? Where did the luggage come from? And what is IN that luggage??? Surely she did NOT go home to their mansion (wherever that mansion was) and get changed and pack a suit case --her father would have phoned ahead and had the servants at the mansion detain her. Did she have a wad of cash in her pajamas with her to buy the clothes???? To me THAT was major continuity error.




To answer the OP: I say "Maybe" depending upon how silly it is for them to be wearing a new change of clothes. But keep it super duper brief.

There are tones of errors in Lord of the Ring movies, but seems fans either just don't notice the obvious, or don't WANT to notice these.

For example... the Ranger gets hung-up beside a ranging beast (ridden by an orc). He tries to free himself, and has lost his sword. Then is draggged off a cliff, and we are SUPPOSED to believe he is possibly drowned (gasp!)

No, surprise is later we see him wake up, after being washed ashore somewhere (phew!). Didn't see that one coming! And luckily... somehow... his sword has been magically replaced. It is STILL in its sheath!

What confounded luck!

avid-dreamer said:

Ok guys..need some opinions here. Now imagine writing an action adventure - you know, fast paced, switching scenes. Anyway, let's say that the characters have to change clothes to hike up a mountain or something.

Is it necessary to have a scene showing this change of clothing?

For example: In National Treasure when Cage and his companions use his father's money to buy new clothes.

Thanks again people!!

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Why have such a scene? If the audience, in the midst of this "fast paced" action scene are worrying about where they got their change of clothes, you're in real trouble.

Do yourself a favor. Watch Jurassic Park again (presuming you've watched it already).

This movie might as well be called, "Lost in the space-time continuum" the way it messes around with time and space -- and nobody notices and nobody cares.

Look, I'll give you one example. They go on this tour around the park with these electronically controlled cars that run on a road that takes them in a big circle around the park.

They pass the T-Rex pen -- it's not there. They move on. They come to the place where the triceratops is, when Ellie goes back and the rest of them go back to the cars.

Sometime later, the storm breaks and the cars have stopped. "Where have the cars stopped?"

And there are cars -- back at exactly the spot they were at before -- in front of the T-Rex pen.

How did they get back there? Did they go all the way around the park? Does the road make some kind of loop?

If that doesn't bother you, during that whole sequence when they're turning the power off and on again -- try to actually figure out what the real sequence of events is -- when things are happening relative to other things.

Makes absolutely no sense.

Nobody cares. It doesn't matter. So they arrive at the base of the mountain dressed one way. One of them puts down a pack of some kind -- maybe he says, "let's get ready." Cut to them climbing the mountain dressed for climbing.

Or just whatever the last scene was -- maybe it didn't have anything to do with mountain climbing. Cut from that to them on the mountain.

If they were in tuxedos and ballgowns in one scene and they're on a mountain dressed for climbing in the next, the audience is pretty much going to figure that time has passed and that somewhere along the line they've gone to the mountain and changed their clothes.

NMS

Captain Morgan said:

There are tones of errors in Lord of the Ring movies

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I'm sure you meant "tons of errors"...

This just struck me as funny... sorry.

Beat me to it!

I'm sure you meant "tons of errors"...

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Well, if we are going to be that anal about it, what I really mean then was Metric TONNES.

And as for the Jurassic Park paradoxes, I believe it all made sense in the book, however in the movie adaptation, most things were cut & thrown out, which leaves a lot of interesting holes, despite they tried to follow the book correctly. All in all, the movie was a huge disapointment for me, but for those who never read the novel, they thought it was the bestest [sic].

BTW, funny story. Even as a young & dumb child, I remember watching the cartoon Shera- Princes of Power (my sisters rented it!) I remember in detail, one scene where the heroin converts her sword into a rope and makes a comment how THIS ROPE IS INFINITELY STRONG, there is nothing in the universe that can break it. Well, before you knew it, the plot changed where the rope became a big problem, suddenly she just cuts it in half like it was nothing to fix the issue at hand.

Yeah, as young & dumb a kid I was, even I spotted the error here. But somehow, the writer & whole production crew did not. Or maybe they did, but underestimated the intelligence of the audience.

I suppose the real answer, is that the writer was pressed for time, and couldn't be bothered to fix his very poor plot structure.

The question to ask about a scene that includes changing clothes is "How does this advance the plot or illuminate character?" If it doesn't do either one in my book, leave it out. It's just house-keeping filler.

We see the actor enter the car, we see the car pull up at the location - we don't kneed to see the drive there.

We see the actor decide to leave one location, we see them arrive at another dressed differently. It's a 'given' that they decided to change clothes in the compressed time difference.

If we need to SEE them change clothes, it's because the clothing itself has some special meaning - The clothing is integral to the plot, or the choice of clothing illuminates the character.

WriteKnight said:

The question to ask about a scene that includes changing clothes is "How does this advance the plot or illuminate character?" If it doesn't do either one in my book, leave it out. It's just house-keeping filler.

We see the actor enter the car, we see the car pull up at the location - we don't kneed to see the drive there.

We see the actor decide to leave one location, we see them arrive at another dressed differently. It's a 'given' that they decided to change clothes in the compressed time difference.

If we need to SEE them change clothes, it's because the clothing itself has some special meaning - The clothing is integral to the plot, or the choice of clothing illuminates the character.

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I like this. And you're making me think of Star Wars when Luke and Hon jumped the two stormtroopers and stole their while armor and helmets. We didn't SEE them change into the while stormtrooper uniforms, but we sure did figure it out. And to be honest I think most of us enjoyed the fact that we were kept somewhat in the dark because it was fun to simply figure it out on our own during those ten or fifteen seconds what it was they were so cleverly doing.

And then later, when they sprung Princess Leia from her cell, they had already ditched their helmets yet still had the white armor on. Then when they all jumped into the garbage chute, and then escaped from the garbage room (because Artoo was able to remotely unlock the door to their garbage masher room so that they could escape) we were next shown a scene where they were now all standing OUTSIDE the garbage room, and Luke and Hon were suddenly no longer wearing those white armor suits --so where did the white armor go to????? Well, we could plainly see via no more than about three or four seconds of on-screen body language that they were all doing their best to scrape the remaining traces of garbage off of their clothes. And we could also see in the background as one of them (either Luke or Hon) was tossing the last hunk of white armor back into the open door of the garbage room they just escaped from. That was just three or four seconds of "show don't tell" and it was going on in the background while we concentrating on the more important actions of Hon and Leia bickering, and of Chewbacca whimpering in fear over the growls of the monster that still lurked in the garbage room.

So the stealing of the uniforms was implied and not laboriously shown, and then the ditching of them was also implied and not laboriously shown. This was all done via methods that involved SOME screentime --but just mere fleeting seconds. The overall treatment of both clothing changes was handled with just enough screentime to make the plot interesting and to make the clothing changes seem credible.

And then there's my all-time favorite clothing change: Indiana Jones in the first Indie movie Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Indie jumped and knocked out a lower-ranking Nazi soldier, and we watched as Indie unbottoned the now-unconscous man's shirt and then slip it onto his own shoulders. But when Indie tried to button it onto himself, the shirt was way too small and so he couldn't even make the buttons reach the button holes. We laughed! It was such a funny twist on that old movie cliche of knock-out-a-bad-guy-and-take-his-clothes-oh-and-don't-worry-that-his-clothes-won't-fit-because-this-is-a-moive-and-the-clothes-always-do. Hilarious!!!

But then along came a Nazi officer who found Indie crouched on the ground with the clothing, and at first we were terrified the officer would spot the unconscious soldier off in the corner and figure out Indie was an intruder. But instead, the officer began playing school marm and was angrily jabberig in German at Indie, scolding him for having such messy clothing. Then finally Indie gave HIM a Hollywood movie punch and knocked HIM out, and took HIS clothes instead. And wouldnlt you know it? The officer's clothing was a perfect fit!

Yup, the Indy-Nazi clothes switch served several purposes. It helped to illustrate the sort of ill-luck that follows Indie's plans, it also helped to show how he can make the most out of any situation by improvising, AND it allowed us to see how he is going forward with the plot.

Now - if someone can explain to me how he can swim out to the submarine, and make it all the way to the secret base without
1)Going INSIDE the submarine -
2)Staying outside and surviving -

There's the HUGE leap of faith that we have to make that the sub never submerged again after that. Sure, I know that WW2 subs were faster on top of the water, running on deisel than submerged on batteries - but does your average filmgoer know that?

WriteKnight said:

Yup, the Indy-Nazi clothes switch served several purposes. It helped to illustrate the sort of ill-luck that follows Indie's plans, it also helped to show how he can make the most out of any situation by improvising, AND it allowed us to see how he is going forward with the plot.

Now - if someone can explain to me how he can swim out to the submarine, and make it all the way to the secret base without
1)Going INSIDE the submarine -
2)Staying outside and surviving -

There's the HUGE leap of faith that we have to make that the sub never submerged again after that. Sure, I know that WW2 subs were faster on top of the water, running on deisel than submerged on batteries - but does your average filmgoer know that?

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I also questioned that one when I first saw the film. But I was told that if a sub CAN avoid submerging --it WILL avoid submerging! And so they remained on the surface all the way there. (Lucky for Indie!)

Exactly- And I think that speaks to the central question of the thread. "How much can you leave out, that the audience will take as a 'given' because of reasonable life experience, and how much needs to be implied to help fill in that 'given'?"

I think the swim to the sub, is an example where the average audience member doesn't have the background knowledge to understand the limitations or operational procedures for WWII submarines. Its always bothered me as a small point of that film. Perhaps a line from the sub commander to the effect - "We'll run on the surface to recharge the batteries" would have been enough - Like tossing the last of the armor into the garbage implied they've been through a changing process... Or Nick Cage's scene of buying clothes.

If it doesn't advance the plot (and clarifying it advances it) - or illuminate character (better still BOTH) - leave it out.