Fashioning a Great Dialogue

Fashioning a great dialogue is a difficult, if not one of the most difficult endeavours you can have in either scriptwriting or in filmmaking. It is not something you can just wing and see where you get at.

A great dialogue not only has to move the story forward, it needs to be visually interesting for the audience to not lose interest or even stop following the plot. And it needs to tell you something about the character or their motives. Every line needs to serve a different purpose, or else it is superfluous to have it.

On the other hand, another grave mistake you can make in scriptwriting dialogue is to TELL too much of the plot rather than to DISPLAY it or to write the dialogue as if it appeared in a novel, not a screenplay that is supposed to portray spoken or even colloquial language. But I already discussed that in earlier blogs so let's move on.

So we already established what we need to look out for when writing a dialogue scene. But what about filming a dialogue?

To be honest, even the best written dialogue scenes can turn out blunt if you do not know how to make them visually pleasing or interesting. I can certainly certify of that.

For my dialogue scene of A GOOD ONE, although it is still far from being perfectly written, turned out to be too flat and unassuming, regarding not only my personal vision for the dialogue scene, but also the associations and allusions others experienced when reading the dialogue.

So what was the problem?

Apart from the fact that we only had 40 minutes of time for shooting the scene and I struggled realising the ideas I had envisioned in my head within that time frame and my abilities at hand. I decided to prioritise finishing the dialogue with only three different shots than experience with additional shots and risk having an unfinished dialogue scene at the end. And I think it shows tremendously, to my dismay.

And while I have gone into detail on why the dialogue scene did not work in another blogpost, I today decided to get more inspiration on how to improve FILMING a dialogue scene to improve.

As it stands, the simplest possibility you have for filming a dialogue is the three shot setup (which I used during the 40 minutes). But being simple is not always the best, so I dug deeper and was reminded to always obey the rule of thirds and the 180°-rule.

Obeying these two rules has a huge, twofold advantage in filming dialogue: For the first, assigning and aligning your characters to each of the vertical lines serves as a stable reference point for you and the audience to establish the characters within the room and in relation to their respective dialogue partners. For the second, you do not get the issue I encountered when I edited my scene: Both characters visually overlaid on the screen and irritated the eye as well as the immersion into the story.

Furthermore, what I lacked (which I first realised after research) was the infamous over-the-shoulder shot. And while I think that most of my blog readers here fully know what that entails, I realised that I gravely underestimated the effect it can have on the audience and that it even suffices to just hint at the character over whose shoulder we are looking.

For, as the Youtuber Tom Antos hinted at, you can already get away with only showing just a bit of shoulder with shallow focus and only up to one third of the actual frame. The most important part is, that the important character at that point needs to occupy two thirds of the frame to establish his role.

Another aspect, which may not be forgotten, is of course the choice of lenses. This will first become an issue for me further down the line once we will get to use the equipment that actually uses different lenses (or once I will be able to fetch my beloved DSLR-camera from Germany).

For the choice of lenses is highly important for the feel and the impression you give of a dialogue. If you film with a 35mm lens, as Tom here points out, you give a lot more perspective and space to each dialogue partner than you would, for example, with a 100mm lens that pulls everything closer to you, and thus hides the surroundings better. Filming a dialogue scene in 100mm also means that the scene becomes more intensive and intimate, depending on whether you want to or not.

But this also means, that you need to stick to your lens choice and do not change lenses mid-shoot since that changes the mood of each take tremendously and gives off a vibe of a thrown together montage instead of a meaningful dialogue scene.

And there's even more:

Fashioning a great dialogue does not only mean that you follow the rules that I mentioned above. While these rules are able to carry you a long way and instantly improve the quality of your dialogue, they are, if anything, only the absolute baseline.

For filming an interesting dialogue means that you also can or even need to employ different angles and perspectives, camera movement, and actor blocking to enhance the story, hint at subplots and additional themes, conflicts, inner states or power relations. And this naturally means that you involve the mise en scène and character action and experiment with location, lenses, and so on.

One thought that I had while thinking on how to make a dialogue more interesting in an instant would be to give each character a minor goal to achieve that clashes with what the other character does or wants, like e.g. one character trying to tidy up a room while the other makes a mess out of it or a character attempting to leave a room while his dialogue partner is hindering him physically. This, to my mind, would not only give the actors something to do, improve the visual aspect and avoid the bare, theatre-like recitation of lines, but it would also double as a chance to display a conflict on a subtler or even slightly different level.

Which is what I want to practice and incorporate in my upcoming scripts to get a more diverse (and professional) take on scriptwriting.

So keep your fingers crossed for me!

References:

Tom Antos (2011) How to Film a Dialogue Scene: Angles, Framing & Rule of Thirds Tutorial 17 [online] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEWx6zbUDrc [Accessed on 2 November 2017]