More Rehearsals, More Dialogue! How I Started Script Formatting

Today, again, we set out to rehearse our dialogues in the seminar room. This task, which I first considered repetitive and thus only mildly helpful, actually surprised me again for its efficiency.

Like last week, we were organising ourselves to read through and act out all ten pieces presented. And while we rehearsed most part of the day, we finally displayed what we learned and improvised so far.

As I wrote in my last post, I rewrote my idea and entire script to make the story work and improve upon my "show, don't tell". So I was happy when I realised that my piece was not only considered well done by our lecturer, but was also loved by the others and especially by the actors who needed no instruction to bring the characters to life like I imagined them.

That made me extremely happy regarding the fact that I did include almost no character cues in the respective parts but rather let the characters be discovered by their dialogue. Which goes to show that a well-written dialogue and script fill the reader's imagination by itself.

The lesson today furthermore taught me how easy it still is to fall into the trap of telling rather than showing, since I - as an actress - sometimes struggled delivering the lines when they turned out too literary. If it sounds like read-through of a Jane Austen-novel, it's probably describing instead of depicting. Which shows how dominant the written language of novels and short stories still are and how detrimental they can be for a script written for film. And that it needs to be carefully revisited as soon as you produce a screen adaptation or shoot a period film.

Finally, the exercise gave me an even deeper understanding and a better grasp of how long a piece of dialogue can be. When I applied for CCAD and wanted to enter a script, I read Martin Schabenbeck's manual on how to format a script in the Hollywood style to get a feeling for the actual running time of my script and to model my short film according to that.

Image taken from: Schabenbeck, M. (2008) Das Drehbuch im Hollywood-Format. Die Konventionen für Stil, Struktur und Layout richtig umsetzen Heidelberg: Dpunkt Verlag

And, lo and behold, with this format, I repeatedly ended up with two pages taking approx. two minutes of screen-time. Research is worth the trouble after all.

References:

Schabenbeck, M. (2008) Das Drehbuch im Hollywood-Format. Die Konventionen für Stil, Struktur und Layout richtig umsetzen Heidelberg: Dpunkt Verlag