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103 8 completing the first draft Visualization You have worked out a story line and idea line. Now comes the fun as you start considering how to put over your ideas visually. Every sequence has a point or a number of points that can be put over by visuals, by commentary, or by a combination of both. Your aim is to find the most powerful way to use the joint forces of both picture and word. As the film proceeds, it makes a series of assertions: today, the car is God; the famine in Ethiopia is tragic beyond all belief; marriage is out; the youngsters of today are crazier than their parents ever were. These statements need illustrating in order to prove their truth. They can be illustrated in comic or serious ways, but they must be proved. So one of your first jobs is to choose the pictures that will prove your points in the most imaginative and interesting way. The writer and director share the job of visualization. The writer will suggest the action and visualization but knows that the director, on location, may add to or alter the suggestion or think of a better way to put over the idea. But the script visualization is always the starting point and is usually a tremendous help to the director. In my automobile accident film, one of the points I wanted to make was that the car often becomes an extension of one’s personality. It From Idea to First Draft 104 can represent power, sex, virility. In the film the point was made visually as follows: Visual Audio Very low shots of the road In my car I feel like a real guy. surface rushing past. The road There’s power in my hands. My blurs at speed. We cut to racing girl’s at my side. Put my foot cars speeding around a track. down and I can get to Monterey Women wave the cars on. in an hour. In my car I get really turned on. You’re just not a man without a car. Cut to a man looking through the window of a car showroom. Inside, two beautiful women in bikinis are sitting on the hoods of a Mercedes and a Ferrari—and smiling. The commentary was in my own words but based on a number of interviews I had done during research. What I wanted from the visuals was not a parallel of the commentary but a visual sense of the meaning behind the commentary. What the visuals had to do was express the machismo that drove the man who was talking. In another part of the film I wanted to talk about all the pressures on the driver. My notes show my first thoughts on the subject. Pressure could be shown by the following sequence: 1. A mass of road signs that block one another and give confusing directions. The driver’s brain is overloaded with information . 2. The windshield is blurred and rain lashed. 3. Inside the car, kids scream and nag. 4. The traffic is getting very heavy. The roads are icy and night is falling. 5. The oncoming drivers are using their brights, and the lights are dazzling, going in and out of focus. 6. It starts to snow. Sometimes you need visuals to illustrate a process or an evolving action, and that’s quite simple. But sometimes you need to find visuals to illustrate something a little more abstract or a little less obvious, and here you can often really be creative. In our proposed university script, we might want to make the point that today’s students are tremendously politically involved. We might write the scene like this: Completing the First Draft 105 Visual Audio A student lies on the grass and Once the student lived what was reads a book beside a river. almost the life of a monk. Solitary and studious, devoted and disciplined. Student riots in Paris, 1968. That idea seems just a little bit Student anti–Gulf War riots in strange today. 2004. Students battle with the police. Here, the whole argument is made visually, with the commentary providing the lightest of frameworks. This point needs stressing because it is one of the most important things in script writing: you can write with words, and you can write with pictures, but very often the pictures will make your point much more powerfully. I wrote earlier that there were few laws for scriptwriters. I...

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