Stages of Scripting

Published by Emil Abraham, May 10th, 2020

Scriptwriting is a process. It begins with gathering information, thinking, analyzing, and questioning, and it ends with devising a creative concept. This visual idea then needs to be developed through some kind of outline or treatment and then be scripted in a format appropriate to the medium concerned. This script format lays out a set of descriptive instructions in a special language about what is to be seen on the screen and heard on the sound track.

Idea

The idea. We know what that is. It is the sharp concept, the most important reason, that underlines the whole film structure.

Treatment

The treatment, or outline. The treatment, or outline, is basically a brief sketch. It suggests an approach and tells the overall story of the ¤lm. Its typical aim is to clarify the purpose and progression of the ¤lm with the funding agency.

2 common purposes of Treatments

The word ‘Treatment’ is used interchangeably and doesn’t always mean the same thing. Some Treatments are designed to help sell an idea and are sometimes accompanied by a script, while others are part of the production process. The main difference between the two is size. Treatments for production purposes are much longer and include a detailed scene-by-scene breakdown; whereas Treatments designed to sell ideas can be little more than a one page summary.

There are no hard and fast rules as to what a Treatment for a television series should contain and its length depends on the complexity of the story being proposed and the production company it is being sent to. However, anyone reading it should come away with a clear understanding of the basic storyline, setting and the main characters involved.

To do this, a Treatment will normally contain a:

Title: A dynamic one. It seems obvious but a good title is often a sign of a solid central idea.
Logline: A powerful one or two-sentence statement of the idea being proposed (circa 25 words).
Synopsis: A three paragraph synopsis outlining the idea in more detail (circa 300 – 500 words).
Episodes: A three or four page episode storyline summary (circa 500 – 1200 words).
Characters: Short descriptive outlines for each of the main characters (circa100 words each).
Script(s): One or two episode scripts. However, submitting a script is not always necessary.

Screenplay/Visual Writing

Basically, visual writing in a screenplay is everything that’s a part of your script that’s not dialogue – in other words, visual descriptions.

This includes:

Scene action: What’s happening in the scene? Did a train just whiz by? Did a horse gallop past a window? What’s happening around your characters?
Character appearance: What does your character look like? Are they clean-cut? Sloppy? Bright-eyed? Tired? What are they wearing? A UPS uniform? A wedding dress? A sweater and slacks? The visual details you choose will tell us about your character as a person and what they’re experiencing in the moment.
Location appearance: What does the space in which your scene takes place look and feel like? Share details that are unique to that space. Don’t tell me a kitchen has a stove and refrigerator (most do!) – instead, tell me what makes that kitchen different from another kitchen. Is it small and cramped? Vast and sterile? Warm and cozy? Be specific.
Character action: What is your character doing? How do they act and react? Someone just said "I love you" to your character – did they look down and start to cry, jump for joy, run away? Their physical responses can communicate what they’re feeling – don’t ignore them.

Simply put, any description that’s intended to paint a picture in the mind of the viewer is considered visual writing.

Short, kinetic sentences foreground specific images: the metronome, Andrew’s blistering hands, the drumsticks. The scene is about "Andrew practicing like mad" until "CRAAACK", his right drumstick "SNAPS IN HALF." You can hear that sound, right? The capitalization helps us imagine it, as does the run-on structure of the preceding line – "struggling, sweating, hands blistering" – contrasting with that single, percussive syllable that stops us short: CRAAACK.

Thanks to Damien Chazelle’s specific imagery, we’re right there with Andrew. We feel his focus and obsessive energy right up to the accident, which releases tension, literally slowing us down with three sentences: "He stops. Spent. Looks at his hand, sweating and throbbing from the blisters." The structure and images work together to sweep us up in the scene action.

Shooting script

A shooting script is the version of a screenplay used during the production of a motion picture. Shooting scripts are distinct from spec scripts in that they make use of scene numbers (along with certain other formatting conventions described below), and they follow a well-defined set of procedures specifying how script revisions should be implemented and circulated. It is used during the production process of your movie to help communicate the filming process to all crew members and actors involved. The shooting script is more elaborate, precise, overwritten version of the screenplay. Unlike what common sense may suggest, the shooting script is not written by the screenwriter. It is written by the director alongside his cinematographer, while both discuss their ideas and shot plan desired for the movie.

In broad terms, the main difference between the screenplay and the shooting script is that the screenplay is a selling tool, whereas the shooting script is a production tool.

Storyboard

The storyboarding process, in the form it is known today, was developed at the Walt Disney studio during the early 1930s, after several years of similar processes being in use at Disney and other animation studios. Storyboarding became popular in live-action film production during the early 1940s.

Storyboards by David Lowery for Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park

A storyboard is essentially a large comic of the film or some section of the film produced beforehand to help film directors, cinematographers and television commercial advertising clients visualize the scenes and find potential problems before they occur. Often storyboards include arrows or instructions that indicate movement.

In creating a motion picture with any degree of fidelity to a script, a storyboard provides a visual layout of events as they are to be seen through the camera lens. In the storyboarding process, most technical details involved in crafting a film can be efficiently described either in picture, or in additional text.

Some live-action directors, storyboard extensively before taking the pitch to their funders, stating that it helps them get the figure they are looking for since they can show exactly where the money will be used. Other directors storyboard only certain scenes, or not at all. Animation directors are usually required to storyboard extensively, sometimes in place of doing a script.

Storyboards were adapted from the film industry to business, purportedly by Howard Hughes of Hughes Aircraft. Today they are used by industry for planning ad campaigns, commercials, a proposal or other projects intended to convince or compel to action. A "quality storyboard" is a tool to help facilitate the introduction of a quality improvement process into an organization.

Use of storyboards in other fields

More recently the term "storyboard" has been used in the fields of web development, software development and instructional design to present and describe interactive events as well as motion on user interfaces, electronic pages and presentation screens. One advantage of using storyboards is that it allows in film and business the user to experiment with changes in the storyline to evoke stronger reaction or interest.

Flashbacks, for instance, are often the result of sorting storyboards out of chronological order to help build suspense and interest.

The process of visual thinking and planning allows a group of people to brainstorm together, placing their ideas on storyboards and then arranging the storyboards on the wall. This fosters more ideas and generates consensus inside the group.

A storyboard is an extremely valuable tool, if you have time to make one. If you don’t make a storyboard, at the very least you need to create a shot list — a version of the script that breaks down the story into a series of shots, and describes each in simple notation of scale and subject.

Shot list

The shot list included uses arrows down the right side to indicate non-consecutive shots that can and should be filmed in continuous takes — that is, the director plans to cutaway briefly to a reaction and then return to the same image, so there’s no reason to stop the camera. The parenthesis indicates the cutaways that are bracketed by the continuous shots.

The function of the shot list during the shoot is that it allows the filmmaker to quickly place the particular shot being recorded into the larger narrative context of the production.

Since it is extremely inefficient to shoot a story in the order the shots appear in the final production — if a dialogue scene cuts back and forth between two people, you’d have to keep resetting the tripod and lighting over and over, repeating all your tech labor after each little snippet — films are always shot out of sequence, organized in a way to get as many of the same kind of shots in a single setup as possible. Do all the shots from one side of scene at once; do all the shots in the same location at once, no matter if some come at the very beginning of the story and some at the very end. This requires pre-planning: the goal being to arrange the shoot so that it requires the least amount of repetitive labor — a big makeup change is more complicated than a camera set-up, so that would take priority, and so on.

The plan for exactly what gets shot in what order is called the shooting schedule. As you go through the shooting schedule, check off each shot as you complete a satisfactory take — then check it off on the shot list too. Just having a shooting schedule is not enough, because you quickly lose the sense of what’s really supposed to be happening in the shot when you look at all the notations out of sequence.

The shot list and shooting schedule examples here contain the minimal amount of

information you’d want such documents to contain. On the one hand, you want to

keep them compact, using as few sheets of paper as possible, so you can keep the paperwork organized amidst any chaos on the set. On the other hand, more detailed notes can help you avoid potential problems more readily.

One thing that is recommended, is adding to the info shown in these examples, a note about continuity — how you get will need to get into or out of a shot in editing. Indicate where you may have a Match-On-Action planned by noting ‘MOA’; make notes on where the screen direction of eye lines, exits/entrances should be at the beginning and end of shots. All of these things are very easy to forget if they’re not written down.

Shooting schedule/shooting order

This requires pre-planning: the goal being to arrange the shoot so that it requires the least amount of repetitive labor — a big makeup change is more complicated than a camera set-up, so that would take priority, and so on.

On the one hand, you want to keep them compact, using as few sheets of paper as possible, so you can keep the paperwork organized amidst any chaos on the set. On the other hand, more detailed notes can help you avoid potential problems more readily.

Script Format - Sample Templates