What the Camera Sees

Last week, we spent some time talking about screenplay form, which at first probably seemed a bit like trying to read an instruction manual for a dishwasher, translated from Japanese to English, by a Dutchman. So it's not the most accessible thing in the world. I started with William Goldman's take because he's a little more entertaining in his approach than your average screenwriter. Syd Field brings us up to speed with the more technical side to screenwriting in his book Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting, and though he may not be as entertaining to read as Goldman, I think he hits the mark pretty well.

According to Field, screenplay form is simple. Okay, so you may be thinking, who is this guy kidding? All these rules for spacing, margins, screen directions, dialogue and something called slug lines. Simple? Yeah right. But then again, didn't we all fall off our bike the first time the training wheels were removed? Screenwriting seems like a daunting task just like riding a bike once did, but when we get into it, it really is quite simple. When you get past the format and all of the rules attached to it, it's really about telling a story. It's different than writing a novel or a short story. It's more about the visual aspects of what happens in the story than anything else. Unlike a stage play, it's less about dialogue than about the actions of characters. And yet, even though it's a tool for laying out how a film is made, the word "camera" should not appear more than a handful of times in a feature length screenplay. Instead, as Field suggests, we should determine who or what our subject is, and focus our writing on them, rather than on the camera. It's what the camera sees that we should concern ourselves with.

So if we should be concerned with what the camera sees, why shouldn't the writer deal with camera angles? According to Field, and any screenwriter worth his salt, deciding on how to shoot a scene is up to the director and cinematographer. The screenwriter's job is to tell the director what to shoot, not how to shoot it. The director then transforms those words on the paper into images on film, in conjunction with the director of photography, whose job it is to light the scene and determine where to place the camera to cinematically capture the story. Still, this all may seem complicated until we actually spend some time reading screenplays and trying to write them ourselves. So that's just what we're going to do over the next week or two. Hopefully, it will be for you like learning to ride a bike (minus perhaps the scrapes and bruises) and once you get the hang of it, it will become second nature.