This week I have writing and improving my script. This script that I am working on is an adaptation of my fiction writing piece ‘Poison’. I have never written a television script before and so wasn’t sure if I was going to enjoy this task. However, I have found it really fun and interesting to do so far. In a way, it makes me think more about the visuals of the scenes. This is because I kept the visuals in ‘Poison’ very minimal, barely even there, in order to keep the scene, in a way, anonymous and mysterious, so the reader could imagine the surroundings the way that they wanted to. Whereas, when I was writing the script, I found I needed to put a lot more thought into where I wanted these characters to be, otherwise the piece would not have worked as well in script form.
I tried to take the key conventions from the existing scripts that I looked at, to use in my own. At the beginning of the scene there is a line that states if it is ‘interior’ or exterior’, where the scene is, and usually the time of day. For example, for my first scene I wrote:
INT. AIRPORT –- DAY.
As well as this, I made the basic layout of my script mirror that of all the other scripts I viewed. The dialogue is situated more centrally; each line is shorter than those of the descriptions/details of the scene.
Character wise, I did not have any names in mind. In my head, the characters were simply ‘Man, Woman, and Girl’. In the original version of ‘Poison’ this did not matter, as their names were not revealed at any point. This, again, left the characters more anonymous and mysterious. However, for the script I thought that I needed some sort of identification for the three. I quite liked ‘Man’ and ‘Woman’ for the man and the woman who is overlooking the scene, just for now, because it mirrors how their identities/intentions aren’t revealed yet. But I thought with the other female character, she needed to have a name. I had the name ‘Jane’ stuck in my head; every time that I thought of another and tried to apply it to her, I knew it didn’t sound right, and I kept returning back to ‘Jane’. So, that is who she became.
