Screenwriting

No doubt, at some point in your life you’ve read a book that’s been made into a movie. And, no doubt, you’ve probably walked out of the movie adaptation thinking “why did they change that part?” or “why did they leave that other part out?” It’s easy to simply think that the screenwriter did a bad job, and certainly moviemakers don’t always share your own take on the emotional tone of a particular book. More often than not, though, movie adaptations are very different from their source books because cinema and prose are simply very different art forms. To think that a book can be directly translated into a movie shows an ignorance of the particular narrative, pacing, and content differences that exist between these two forms. Someone once said, “Trying to talk about music is like trying to dance about architecture.” Trying to make a straight translation from written text to moving images is almost as difficult. The point is that screenwriting is a very particular type of writing, and as such, it demands a good amount of study and practice. No amount of production can save a poorly written script, so it’s important to spend the time building a sturdy screenplay. No matter what type of project you’re shooting—feature film, TV show, documentary, or corporate video—you still need to understand the basic concepts of good storytelling and strong screenwriting.