To examine beauty / ugliness:

To illuminate a glance we would not have seen (as in Lady Snowblood):

To establish an essential prop in the narrative (thanks to Keith Uhlich):

To insert an important text or image that pushes the story forward:

To inspire using a much-loved visual symbol:

To convey non-verbal emotions (like confusion and embarrassment):

To emphasize a word(s):

To make us face a face that we may not wish to see:

To intimidate:

To emphasize power, influence, obsession, or one individual’s absolute resolve to stay the course:

To create a feeling of unease and paranoia:

To punctuate the severity of a tragedy (as in Battleship Potemkin):

To convey isolation and emptiness:

To show a different side of a character, such as an army leader’s personal, private breakdown:

To terrify (as in Opera):

To disorient (thanks to Jonathan Lapper):

To tantalize (as in Malena):

To show a moment of extreme intimacy:

To make a visual statement about a character (as in Miller’s Crossing thanks to the Opening Shots Project):

To reveal a sought-after MaGuffin:

To capitalize on a heightened emotional near-death climax:

To provide a moment of humor:

And to give resolution to a conflict:

– Mystery Man

In his own words, Mystery Man was “famous yet anonymous, failed yet accomplished, brilliant yet semi-brilliant. A homebody jetsetting around the world. Brash and daring yet chilled with a twist.”

MM blogged for nearly 4 years and tweeted for only 4 months, then disappeared – mysteriously.

The Story Department continues to republish his best articles on Monday.

Here, you’ll also be informed about the release of his screenwriting book.

Sheila O’Malley’s post on a close-up of Bud White in L.A. Confidential reminded us that characters with dimensions, with varying inner conflicts and emotions – a.k.a. depth – foster the right circumstances for great acting through close-ups.

CLOSE-UPS, BABY!

Of a moment in which we watch Bud, Sheila writes: “He is totally still. He doesn’t blink. He just stares. He seems like a snake, or some kind of predator. He’s looking out the window, but there is a coiled violence in him, a potential for action that vibrates in his expression. He is waiting for his moment. But the main reason why the close-up is so arresting, so startling … is that beneath all of that … somehow … is sadness.”

Matt Zoller Seitz had a great close-ups blog-a-thon, you must check this out. I love Jim Emerson’s Free-Association Dream Sequence. I love Stephen Bissette’s article on The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly. And I love Simon Hsu’s Emotion through Bodily Motion: Acting and the Frame in John Cassavetes’s Faces. “How maddening, in a medium that exists as a series of images, is it to find that dialogue has replaced what visuals should say?”

How maddening, in a medium that exists as a series of images,
is it to find that dialogue has replaced what visuals should say?

Another great article, Chet Mellema on Kubrick’s use of close-ups in 2001, focuses on the scene where Hal watches Dave and Frank speak to each other in the pod: “This close-up/warning not only functions as a plot point for Dave’s last-resort space walk later in the film, but it also forms for the viewer a general sense of foreboding and signals perhaps that what Frank and Dave are about to do may have unintended consequences if they are not cautious.

Frank and Dave do apparently isolate themselves from HAL’s ability to hear their conversation. Unfortunately, as we all know, they fail to hide from HAL’s paranoid, malicious gaze. Kubrick deftly conveys this information through a series of five, quick close-ups.”

Kubrick deftly conveys this information
through a series of five, quick close-ups.

And then there was Craig’s unexpected article about Shattered Glass: “It is the conference call scene in Lane’s office that marks the turning point for this transition. Glass’s most recently published scoop–a wild yarn about a computer hacker blackmailing a powerful software company–has been challenged by a duo of reporters (played by Zahn and Dawson, with Cas Anvar as their editor) at Forbes.com. While an increasingly panicky Glass attempts to deflect, dodge and stonewall their questions, Lane sits quietly and observes.

A scene isn’t just about a shifting of values,
pushing the story forward […]

And it is at this point, for approximately twenty-five seconds, the camera begins to push slowly toward Sarsgaard’s face.” A scene isn’t just about a shifting of values, pushing the story forward, escalating the conflict, creating reversals, twists, and revelations, who wants what from whom, etc, it’s also good to think about WHO that scene is really about.

We know from our Cinema Europe series that close-ups were historically designed to be a deterrence to illegal forgeries of popular silent films. Nothing could be a better stamp of actual authenticity than a human face. In fact, Episode 1 of Cinema Europe showcased many examples of early close-ups – characters looking through keyholes or spectacles or eating camera lenses just to show something different to bring audiences back for more.

Close-ups were historically designed to be
a deterrence to illegal forgeries of popular silent films.

There was G.A. Smith’sThe Sick Kitten in 1903 that showed a medium shot of two children in a room. One is holding a kitten. Then Smith cuts to a close-up of the cat taking a spoonful of medicine. There were concerns at the time that audiences, who were still accustomed to watching live theatre, would repel at such an intimate moment. But Smith insisted and kept the close-up because he thought audiences would want to see this curious action in greater detail. He was, of course, correct and audiences loved it.

Can we, as screenwriters, incorporate close-ups in our specs? Of course we can, even though we no longer write camera angles. They’re simple variations of Secondary Headings. And you can use this whether it’s a face or a hand or an object:

– Mystery Man

In his own words, Mystery Man was “famous yet anonymous, failed yet accomplished, brilliant yet semi-brilliant. A homebody jetsetting around the world. Brash and daring yet chilled with a twist.”

MM blogged for nearly 4 years and tweeted for only 4 months, then disappeared – mysteriously.

The Story Department continues to republish his best articles on Monday.

Here, you’ll also be informed about the release of his screenwriting book.

Karel FG Segers

Karel Segers wrote his first produced screenplay at age 17. Today he is a story analyst with experience in acquisition, development and production. He has trained students worldwide, and worked with half a dozen Academy Award nominees. Karel speaks more European languages than he has fingers on his left hand, which he is still trying to find a use for in his hometown of Sydney, Australia. The languages, not the fingers.

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The next scene is from a script that marked my 100th TriggerStreet review. It’s written by our longtime friend Mickey Lee Bukowski. If you were to mix a little bit of James Bond and Indiana Jones and throw this new character into a 1944 a British commando team battling the Nazis, you’ll get a big script called Operation: Atomic Blitz and a protagonist by the name of Garrett Davies. Great, great fun.

It’s entertaining how Mickey Lee plays with action genre expectations while also giving us the hero’s arc in the protagonist IN AN ACTION MOVIE, which is unusual (and welcome), especially in a franchise-starter.

In this scene, the commando team is storming a German castle. A little background: the castle is still partially in ruins from an earlier scene, which is why there are lots scaffolding. There’s also a little ribbing about Garrett having once tried to steal the Crown Jewels. He was a bad thief given a second chance by joining this commando team.

I love the way Mickey cuts back and forth between the smoking guard on the main platform and Garrett on the scaffolding.

And the gag is priceless.

– Mystery Man

In his own words, Mystery Man was “famous yet anonymous, failed yet accomplished, brilliant yet semi-brilliant. A homebody jetsetting around the world. Brash and daring yet chilled with a twist.”

MM blogged for nearly 4 years and tweeted for only 4 months, then disappeared – mysteriously.

The Story Department continues to republish his best articles on Monday.

Here, you’ll also be informed about the release of his screenwriting book.

This writer found himself so inspired by Jennifer van Sijll’s book Cinematic Storytelling that he wrote for himself a nearly dialogue-free screenplay.

The result is a creative exercise, just to practice the art of telling a story through visuals. The title: 99 Luft Ballons. It’s a story about a couple separated by a big ugly wall and the protagonist, Albert Schaff, dresses like a clown and floats over the wall with a bunch of balloons to be with the one he loves. It’s really moving, actually.

In this scene toward the end of Act 2, Albert’s at the job office (where he’s paid to be a clown for parties) and he just realized that the balloons won’t work. He goes to tell them he doesn’t want to be a clown anymore.

At the beginning of the scene, he’s small and in the background (feeling diminished) until he realizes that they need him to do the birthday party for the chancellor’s kid. He sees this as his possible escape and he moves up to the desk and towers over the poor little clerk who is now the diminished one.

This brings to mind the scene in Citizen Kane where Kane (having just learned from his guardian, Thatcher, that the crash of ’29 wiped out his estate) paces along the Z-Axis and walks from the foreground to the background and back to the foreground again.

Orson Welles communicated visually without one word of dialogue that Kane had returned to a state of boyhood. Great!

Ironically enough, in Bob’s script – which was virtually dialogue-free – this is one of the few scenes that actually has dialogue.

Anyway, hope you enjoy it:

– Mystery Man

In his own words, Mystery Man was “famous yet anonymous, failed yet accomplished, brilliant yet semi-brilliant. A homebody jetsetting around the world. Brash and daring yet chilled with a twist.”

MM blogged for nearly 4 years and tweeted for only 4 months, then disappeared – mysteriously.

The Story Department continues to republish his best articles on Monday.

Here, you’ll also be informed about the release of his screenwriting book.

by Mystery Man

I love the way Towne uses Secondary Headings to cut back and forth between Gittes and Mulwray.

In the hands of lesser writers, this sequence could have been a bear to read and follow. With a pro like Robert Towne, it’s simple, seamless, and visual. As far as I’m concerned, there was no other way to write this sequence.

And finally, here’s the opening scene from The Long Kiss Goodnight by Shane Black.

A number of elements I love about this scene. He has the camera panning from the windowpane over to the bed and to the eyes of the sleeping little girl who wakes up.

It’s dark. The mother by the bed is just a vague shape.

After a little dialogue, she turns on the nightlight, which brings a surprising visual revelation. And then we’re back to the mother by the bed and then back to same windowpane where we began. Perfect.

My man, Shane Black – I love his work.

– Mystery Man

In his own words, Mystery Man was “famous yet anonymous, failed yet accomplished, brilliant yet semi-brilliant. A homebody jetsetting around the world. Brash and daring yet chilled with a twist.”

MM blogged for nearly 4 years and tweeted for only 4 months, then disappeared – mysteriously.

The Story Department continues to republish his best articles on Monday.

Here, you’ll also be informed about the release of his screenwriting book.

His descriptions help visualize (without taking you out of the story by using technical jargon) that the camera would pan back to reveal that the eye is just an image on a screen.

As we pan and see more of the mechanism, we’d learn an important detail by seeing the VOIGHT-KAMPFF words.

The camera would keep panning back to reveal the desk and then pan around or perhaps cut to Leon.

We’d first see his nametag and the folded, pudgy hands in his lap before we move up to his face. I love the way he carefully leads your mind’s eye around the room through his simple descriptions.

he carefully leads your mind’s eye around the room
through his simple descriptions.

He goes from the extreme close-up of the eye to the mechanism on the table and over to Leon. Then there’s a cut to Holden, the man facing him, which reads like a medium shot. It’s not until after that cut that we’re even given a description of the room.

How many aspiring writers would start with just a general description of the room and try to use dialogue to get out the VOIGHT-KAMPFF information as well as the names of the two characters in the room? This is such a great, writing-the-shots example of cinematic storytelling. It’s the way Fancher is thinking like a filmmaker that’s impressive to me. The result in the finished film (if you can ever call Blade Runner a “finished film”) is slightly different.

How many aspiring writers would start with just
a general description of the room and try to use dialogue

The shots are all there, as described in the script, but Ridley Scott would open the film with a shot of the city and an approaching vehicle that’s flying toward the Tyrell building so that you could see Holden pacing in a window as he waits for Leon to show up.

Then he cuts to the interior of the room. Leon walks in, and for some reason, Ridley uses a VOICE OVER to introduce him. A computerized female voice says something like: “Next subject: Kowalski, Leon.” Ugh, makes me cringe every time. Ridley should’ve listened to his screenwriter. It was far better on the page.

Ridley should’ve listened to his screenwriter.
It was far better on the page.

Second, here’s a scene written by Alex Proyas (with the help of David S. Goyer and Lem Dobbs) from their Dark City screenplay, which became a four-star film, one of Ebert’s Great Movies.

In fact, he once went through the movie shot-by-shot with film students in Hawaii.

It took him four days. He wrote,

“Proyas likes deep-focus compositions. Many interior spaces are long and narrow. Exteriors look down one street to the vanishing point, and then the camera pans to look down another street, equally long. The lighting is low-key and moody.

The color scheme depends on blacks, browns, shadows and the pallor of the Strangers; warmer colors exist in human faces, in neon signs and on the billboard for Shell Beach. ‘I am simply grateful for this shot,’ I said in Hawaii more than once. ‘It is as well-done as it can possibly be.’

Many other great films give you the same feeling — that their makers were carried far beyond the actual requirements of their work into the passion of creating something wonderful.”

Alex Proyas is a writer-director so this scene has some camera angles in it, which we would not write. It’s just as easy to say “SLEEPING EYES – between waves of light…” than “ANGLE ON SLEEPING EYES.” They both mean the same thing. Also, you could just as easily say “WALKER” instead of “TIGHT ON WALKER.” Instead of “P.O.V.”, you could write “He looks” and write “AROUND THE ROOM” as a Secondary Heading to imply a pan.

You can easily visualize the editing in this scene, too –
where one shot ends and the next one begins.

In any case, I love the way he’s thinking visually here and begins this scene by moving the camera around the room, first with the glass syringe on the floor, over to the clothes on a chair, to the puddles of water, and up the tub to the sleeping eyes of Jonathan Walker. You can easily visualize the editing in this scene, too – where one shot ends and the next one begins.

– Mystery Man

In his own words, Mystery Man was “famous yet anonymous, failed yet accomplished, brilliant yet semi-brilliant. A homebody jetsetting around the world. Brash and daring yet chilled with a twist.”

MM blogged for nearly 4 years and tweeted for only 4 months, then disappeared – mysteriously.

The Story Department continues to republish his best articles on Monday.

Here, you’ll also be informed about the release of his screenwriting book.

Karel FG Segers

Karel Segers wrote his first produced screenplay at age 17. Today he is a story analyst with experience in acquisition, development and production. He has trained students worldwide, and worked with half a dozen Academy Award nominees. Karel speaks more European languages than he has fingers on his left hand, which he is still trying to find a use for in his hometown of Sydney, Australia. The languages, not the fingers.

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel!

Below is yet another example of narrative paintings. This one by Wes Christensen and titled “John’s Dilemma.” As strange as I know this will sound, the painting above brings to mind two films: The Conversation and Raging Bull.

THE CONVERSATION

Notice all of the straight, rigid lines – the walls, the shelves, the books, the television, and even the sculptures. This reminds me of Harry Caul’s personal environment in The Conversation, a movie that came out of Francis Ford Coppola’s interest in repetition through symbols of the circular.

To quote Jennifer Van Sijll in Cinematic Storytelling,

“What is being repeated is man’s emotional weakness represented by deceit and betrayal…

Harry is a surveillance expert. His outer person is symbolized by the linear. He is rational, technically competent, detached, and remote. Coppola gives him clothes and a physical environment made up of straight, elongated lines.

Harry’s job is dependent on the circular spinning wheels of the tape recorder. As long as he stays detached from their content, he is competent and stable.”

Harry, of course, gets drawn into the emotional lives of his subjects, which is his undoing, as the surveillance expert becomes the surveillance subject. There’s a scene toward the end where he tries to change the outcome and enters the building of the man who hired him. According to Jennifer Van Sijll in Cinematic Storytelling,

“He enters a building that is linear on the outside, but circular on the inside – just like Harry. Once inside, he is confronted on the circular stairwell by corporate thugs. Below him is a floor tiled in a circular pattern. Once ejected from the building, he is safe again. He walks along the linear structure almost disappearing into its gray lined walls.”

RAGING BULL

In Wes Christensen’s painting, did you notice the image on the TV set, which is from the Psycho Shower Scene?

Midway into Raging Bull, we see Jake La Motta try to fix his television set. He’s begun to lose his way mentally, and he’s become increasingly paranoid of those around him. Scorsese uses the intermittent TV signal to illustrate Jake’s intermittent sanity and escalating mental agitation.

When his wife enters and kisses Jake’s brother on the cheek, Jake’s paranoia is set off and the TV goes completely haywire.

To sum it up – if we are to take from all of those straight, rigid lines that John, like Harry Caul, is perhaps a rational, technically competent, detached, and remote individual, then the image on the television tells us that there is something very disturbing at the core of his “dilemma.”

And in fact, the other man looking at the television set appears to be quite disturbed with his hand covering his eyes.

Or… perhaps John’s just not having any luck with his garage sale.

– Mystery Man

In his own words, Mystery Man was “famous yet anonymous, failed yet accomplished, brilliant yet semi-brilliant. A homebody jetsetting around the world. Brash and daring yet chilled with a twist.”

MM blogged for nearly 4 years and tweeted for only 4 months, then disappeared – mysteriously.

The Story Department continues to republish his best articles on Monday.

Here, you’ll also be informed about the release of his screenwriting book.

Karel FG Segers

Karel Segers wrote his first produced screenplay at age 17. Today he is a story analyst with experience in acquisition, development and production. He has trained students worldwide, and worked with half a dozen Academy Award nominees. Karel speaks more European languages than he has fingers on his left hand, which he is still trying to find a use for in his hometown of Sydney, Australia. The languages, not the fingers.

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel!

Her First Love Letter.

(Continued from last week)

To quote Bordwell:

“The girl on the left, bathed in light, leaning forward eagerly and wearing the pale frilly dress, can be seen as the more inexperienced of the pair, caught up in the anticipation of the young man’s ardor. The more worldly woman sits relaxed, perhaps a little skeptical but also tolerant of the ways of young love… Narrative paintings like this are evidently one source of early cinema’s approach to staging and composition. This ‘full shot’ somewhat recalls the sort of thing we see throughout European filmmaking of the first twenty years.”

Marcus Stone had some other interesting narrative paintings. Consider these:

Notice the lady in the background dressed in black, on the other side of the wall, hiding in the woods, and jealously watching this moment. It’s titled “My lady is a widow and childless.”  And here we have an interesting painting.

This one is titled “In Love.” Hmm… Are they really?

Well, it seems to me there must be some obstacles between them that’s getting in the way of their love, wouldn’t you agree?

I also love the works of Cali Rezo.

The above image reminds me of a quote by Ingmar Bergman’s Swedish cinematographer, Sven Nykvist: “The truth always lies in the character’s eyes. It is very important to light so the audience can see what’s behind each character’s eyes. That’s how the audience gets to know them as human beings. It opens up their souls.”

Consider the different emotions conveyed in the image below when a character covers her face with her hands compared to when she hides her head in her arms.

In these next two images, the light and darkness poured onto the females implies a conflicted inner nature:

In fact, these two images bring to mind Billy Mernit’s Light and Shadowposts (Part One and Part Two).

I’m going to do a few more articles like this. It would be great if other screenwriters blogged about visuals and the meaning of images.

I recall Robert Evans saying in “The Biggest Mistake the Writers Make:”

“I can pick up a screenplay and flip through the pages. If all I see is dialog, dialog, dialog, I won’t even read it. I don’t care how good the dialog is – it’s a moving picture. It has to move all the time… Screenwriters do not get the lesson… It’s not the stage. A movie audience doesn’t have the patience to sit and learn a lesson. Their eyes need to be dazzled. The writer is the most important element in the entire film because if it ain’t on the page it ain’t going to be on the screen.”

– Mystery Man

In his own words, Mystery Man was “famous yet anonymous, failed yet accomplished, brilliant yet semi-brilliant. A homebody jetsetting around the world. Brash and daring yet chilled with a twist.”

MM blogged for nearly 4 years and tweeted for only 4 months, then disappeared – mysteriously.

The Story Department continues to republish his best articles on Monday.

Here, you’ll also be informed about the release of his screenwriting book.

Karel FG Segers

Karel Segers wrote his first produced screenplay at age 17. Today he is a story analyst with experience in acquisition, development and production. He has trained students worldwide, and worked with half a dozen Academy Award nominees. Karel speaks more European languages than he has fingers on his left hand, which he is still trying to find a use for in his hometown of Sydney, Australia. The languages, not the fingers.

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel!

(Continued from last week)

Is he just shy and that’s why he has three books with him? I wonder, is he working up the courage to converse with her? Is he interested in her? His left hand is conveniently close to brushing her arm.

She, on the other hand, seems stiff and stoic. She wants to interact with him. I dare say, she wants to be touched. She’s rigid in her posture, almost nervous, and with her right hand unfolding the shawl, there’s a hint of invitation.

Would you like to know its title? Married by Walter Sadler. To quote Mr. David Bordwell, “Once the title tells us that the couple are husband and wife, we can infer that their passion has subsided, largely through the husband’s self-absorbed inattention. Did he really need to take three books into the garden? The single-word title also lets us see certain elements as iconographic clues.

The audience would be sucked right in with curiosity.

The woman’s white dress and bouquet recall the wedding, and the fallen badminton birdie and racket suggest an earlier time when they played together. Kristin sees sexual symbolism in the flowers in her lap and the books in his. The gallery’s caption suggests that the turtle is going off to hibernate and that the blocked-off back garden suggests no future for the relationship.”

I can imagine this as an opening scene in a film. The audience would be sucked right in with curiosity, wouldn’t they? Not only that, I would rather watch a scene like this with music and no dialogue and just observe these two characters interact and wonder what’s going to happen next than five pages of talk. Everything we need to know about this couple is told to us through visuals and body language and acting.

Screenwriters are filmmakers, too.

I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say it would be rare to read about a scene like this one without dialogue. We would only discover a scene like this in a script if it was composed by a writer-director for his/her own film.

Screenwriters are filmmakers, too, but I believe too many screenwriters (amateurs and pros alike) don’t think visually enough, which is in part why I wrote such a glowing review of Cinematic Storytelling. It isn’t enough to write a good story. We have to render that story cinematically.

– Mystery Man

In his own words, Mystery Man was “famous yet anonymous, failed yet accomplished, brilliant yet semi-brilliant. A homebody jetsetting around the world. Brash and daring yet chilled with a twist.”

MM blogged for nearly 4 years and tweeted for only 4 months, then disappeared – mysteriously.

The Story Department continues to republish his best articles on Monday.

Here, you’ll also be informed about the release of his screenwriting book.

Karel FG Segers

Karel Segers wrote his first produced screenplay at age 17. Today he is a story analyst with experience in acquisition, development and production. He has trained students worldwide, and worked with half a dozen Academy Award nominees. Karel speaks more European languages than he has fingers on his left hand, which he is still trying to find a use for in his hometown of Sydney, Australia. The languages, not the fingers.

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel!

This book is exactly what the screenwriting community needs right now.

If you’ve read every book under the sun about storytelling and how to write a screenplay, then Jennifer’s your girl. She will take you to the next level, because her book is about how to render your story cinematically.

Jennifer offers you 100 non-dialogue techniques to convey ideas in film. It’s great. On the left page, she’ll give the technique, and on the right page, she’ll give screencaps and show you how it was written in the script. Writers are filmmakers, too, ya know, and this is quite literally an encyclopedia of “show, don’t tell.”

And yes, Jennifer’s qualified to write this book. She teaches screenwriting at San Francisco State. She has an MFA from USC’s Department of Cinema-Television. She’s worked as a script analyst for Universal Pictures (Hey, Billy, Jenn’s a cutie. Can you hook me up? Hehehe…). She’s also been an analyst for independent producers and pay television. In 1994, she won the Panavision New Filmmaker Award. In 1995, she was named honorary Gilliland Chair at San Jose State for teaching excellence. She’s taught intensive weekend scriptwriting courses for UC Berkeley for six years.

Get this – Section 1 (the first 16 pages of her book) are available for free in .pdf form right here. (There are about 250 pages in all.)

Have you downloaded her sample chapter yet?

Good.

Turn to page 4 (page 7 of the .pdf document).

You will notice that this first free section talks about SPACE: 2-D & 3-D SCREEN DIRECTION. She explains things that should be common knowledge for every screenwriter – 2-D Space: the X-Axis (horizontal line), the Y-Axis (vertical line), and 3-D space: the Z-Axis (foreground to background).

Now consider this video:

From page 4 to page 7, she covers this opening sequence in Hitchcock’s classic Strangers on a Train. First, this sequence is just plain fun. I love it. Consider how much information we learn about these two characters just by looking at their shoes and pants. One is a bit of a dandy with his two-tone shoes and fancy pants and the other has an every-man quality to him with his conservative lace-ups. Also, notice how the protagonist walks from left-to-right on the screen and the antagonist walks from right-to-left. To quote Jennifer:

Left-to-Right

As Westerners we read left-to-right. If you rented fifty studio-made movies, there’s a good chance that the “good guy” will enter screen left every time. When the “good guy” moves left-to-right our eyes moves comfortably. Subconsciously, we begin to make positive inferences.

Right-to-Left

Conversely, the antagonist usually enters from the right. Since our eyes aren’t used to moving from right-to-left, the antagonist’s entrance makes us uncomfortable. The screenwriter exploits this by transferring our learned discomfort to the character. The subtle irritant directs the audiences to see the character negatively. In the same way, we code a black hat as a negative symbol, we can also code screen direction negatively.

Now watching these two characters walk toward each other on the screen along the X-Axis like this implies an impending collision, and indeed, when they finally sit down, one shoe knocks the other one. As Jennifer says, “Visually, their meeting has already implied collision. This makes us lean in all the more as we suspect it is all going to be bad –very bad.”

So what’s been accomplished here? What’s the “Dramatic Value?” “By using screen direction to graphically suggest a pending collision, the film has set up conflict and character, and peaked our fears – all in under sixty seconds.”

There’s another shot in this clip I’d like to point out. At :58 seconds we are shown a variety of train tracks along the Y-Axis, which is covered on page 6 of her book. To quote Jennifer:

“After already graphically suggesting that the meeting of the men will result in collision, Hitchcock cuts to an exterior shot. Hitchcock takes us to the train tracks upon which their train is traveling. At first, we see only clean linear lines of the track. The train is “on course.” It moves smoothly with a fixed speed and an unobstructed route ahead. Now we come upon an exchange of tracks.

The lines are a mess of competing directions. Then – suddenly the train veers off. It heads toward the right side of the frame. This is the same side previously occupied by the antagonist. The graphics suggest that the protagonist has abandoned his true course and moved to the world of the antagonist.”

What’s the “Dramatic Value” of this shot? “By using the Y-Axis to set up a linear established route, one that represents safety and normalcy, Hitchcock could also establish its opposite – the dangerous detour. The metaphor is also a succinct synopsis of the plot: What happens to a good man when his path is suddenly diverted?”

I love it.

This really helps aspiring screenwriters to think more visually and consider what information certain visuals conveys to the audience and empowers them to exploit that effectively. Every writer should have these techniques in the back of his/her mind when he/she writes in order to avoid excessive dialogue and verbal exposition.

My only complaint about this book (beyond the few minor grammatical errors I noticed) would be the screenplay insertions, because so many examples are very dated format techniques. We know from Dave Trottier, author of the Screenwriter’s Bible, that contemporary specs cannot have camera angles or big, overwritten blocks of action lines as we see in so many of those examples. (This book was, in part, what inspired the Psycho Shower Scene post.)

But I look at those techniques and feel inspired and wonder how we would write those techniques today and how I can incorporate those examples into my own stories and well, that should make Jennifer very happy.

Her book also reminded me again how Citizen Kane is so masterful in terms of cinematic techniques. You should turn to page 10 (page 13 of the .pdf document) where Kane paces along the Z-Axis and walks from the foreground to the background and back to the foreground again. Without a word of dialogue, Orson Welles communicates to the audience that Kane has returned to a state of boyhood.

Brilliant.

(Continued)

– Mystery Man

In his own words, Mystery Man was “famous yet anonymous, failed yet accomplished, brilliant yet semi-brilliant. A homebody jetsetting around the world. Brash and daring yet chilled with a twist.”

MM blogged for nearly 4 years and tweeted for only 4 months, then disappeared – mysteriously.

The Story Department continues to republish his best articles on Monday.

Here, you’ll also be informed about the release of his screenwriting book.

Karel FG Segers

Karel Segers wrote his first produced screenplay at age 17. Today he is a story analyst with experience in acquisition, development and production. He has trained students worldwide, and worked with half a dozen Academy Award nominees. Karel speaks more European languages than he has fingers on his left hand, which he is still trying to find a use for in his hometown of Sydney, Australia. The languages, not the fingers.

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