Scriptwriting was an all new frontier for me. In my previous projects the most I had done was to write a general outline for what I wanted to do so this was a first for me. I came up with the idea for the story as part of a project in my AV class. We came in one day and our teacher asked us to choose one word. I chose war. Once we put everyone’s words up on the board she told us to try and pick one or more words from the board and come up with a video that reflected the teme. I chose the word I came up with (war). Several rabbit holes later I had a story about a brother who had been dishonorably discharged and made his younger brother go deaf.
Whenever I sat down to type the script, I chose the courier font (I wanted that authentic script look). I had some trouble with this process. The main reason this caused a headache is because one day I did a major revision of the script (combing for grammatical errors and to see if it made any sense on paper). After about fifteen minutes I had to completely remove about half of the script to refresh my brain. Once I did this things started coming together in a more sensible way. Another thing that bothered me with the script is that there are quite a few scenes that were put in the film last minute and I couldn’t revise the script. I know scripts aren’t the final word on a project, but whenever I would read through the script it would cause me some confusion. At the end of it however, I was thankful that I had wrote a script. I have been on projects were we improvised most of the filming and that really hurt my cinematography and editing process down the line.
It wasn’t all trouble and headache though. I had a lot of fun sitting down and typing the script up. A lot of the time I will get ideas for films and then forget my ideas. This way whenever I wrote the script, I could kind of keep track of where I wanted to go creatively. I also learned how hard it could be to write a script. I tried to keep mine coherent for the most part. I included things like “Keys” and “Setup” to use as a barrier between the summary, mechanics, notes, etc. and the actual meat (dialogue and scene/shots/angles). Another thing that was unique about my experience with this project.
In conclusion, the scriptwriting was admittedly the most dry, but most important (at least organizationally speaking) of the four categories. I got a lot out of it. I learned how to take your ideas on paper and apply them in reality. It was very different from what I was used to on other projects, but it did help whenever I was on set trying to figure out what scene I did and didn’t need to shoot next.