Dialogues and Script Readthrough

For today's fun task, each of us wrote two minutes' worth of dialogue to present and, most importantly, be acted out in class. And since this is all about scriptwriting for film and TV, we naturally had to obey the omnipotent rule of visual storytelling; a mantra often repeated in the past weeks: 'Show, don't tell.'

Which is by far easier said than done.

In order to get a feeling of how long two minutes of dialogue can be and of how our dialogues can play out time-wise without being directly thrown into the abysmal jungle that is script formatting, we set about to act out each one of these scripted scenes. I ended up being pretty close to the target by achieving 2:09 min on the clock with approx. two pages, but naturally, others had it more difficult, so we also ended up with 4 to 5 minutes, depending on how strongly we, as the actors, acted out the dialogue.

But while my script may have been close to the time mark, it definitely possessed other, far major problems:

1. Since I was always unsure of how wordy I can get in dialogue, I tested the waters with a 'confession scene'. You all know those confession scenes at the end of a film or an episode, when the hero is confronted with his evil/mad antagonist who summarises the important plot points from their point of view, thereby putting a twist to the story or providing a fuller picture of it?

While there are a lot of films that can pull it off neatly (and far more which do a horrible job in even attempting...), I wanted to test how far I can go before this has the contrary effect.

My result first became obvious after seeing it played out in front of me: My dialogue was to wordy, the actors stumbled over the lines, had trouble memorising them and my script was all about telling, but not about showing. Which is the reason why it turned people away, especially me as its scriptwriter!

2. Since my schooling in English mostly relied on formal essay-writing rather than actually speaking naturally, my dialogue turned out too literary to be considered a proper spoken part. My dialogue sounded like a piece of literature in every way imaginable. This is when I realised that I am not yet capable of writing colloquial English that would be spoken in film and furthermore be perceived as natural. And that means that I need to watch more films in order to increase my focus on dialogue.

3. Since I have a foible for drama in dialogue, I overdramatised the lines of one of the two characters to see how the spoken imagery would play out and how extravagant I could get before it turned too tacky (or too literal). I'll make this one short: My scene possessed the aesthetic value of a car accident. Those really grand, dramatic lines that I imagined to speak of inner turmoil, are highly difficult to create and - I reckon - rather achieved by minimalism and ellipsism.

I can only repeat it: It is true that the brain tricks us in telling our story in the best possible way! The exercise today really helped to slowly get a feeling on how deceiving our own brain, and especially mine as a non-native speaker writing in and for a different language, can be.

But having been an actor and extra today, I learned even more about scriptwriting, than I initially thought I would:

a) I learned, how differently texts are interpreted by others and how vital character cues can be for their interpretation. Which I found to be extremely interesting since I was always taught to keep character cues to a strict minimum to not offend the actors by prescribing them what to do. But in my case, by almost completely eradicating character cues from my script, I made it nearly impossible for my actors to interpret the dialogue and deliver it in a natural way (much less in the way that I intended them to do).

b) I learned, that shorter sentences, interspearsed with action cues, are faster to learn, easier to keep in mind and much more natural to act out. I guess that the dynamic between language memory and body memory really does help creating a stronger connection between both, which in turn eases the performance tremendously.

c) Also, if you constantly have to skim over lengthy descriptions that are formatted the same as the dialogue lines, it makes it really confusing to quickly learn and interpret the script. Which is why I will soon look into script formatting to get a better understanding of how to properly format and ease the job for everyone.

And last but not least, d) It is truly, highly demanding to act the dialogues out over and over again, in a certain way and over a stretched period of time, which is a strong indication for me to think about regular breaks and long-time preparation for the actors when filming on set.

Finally, we recorded the pieces of spoken dialogue! Since I was acting in a total of three pieces together with Lynley, I only managed to be sound op and camera op once. And although acting was tremendous and highly informative fun, it was also extremely demanding for me as a non-native speaker.