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Screenwriting Visual Grammar
It's All About Making Meaning
In your screenwriting, visual grammar offers a truly wonderful means of expressing the deep meaning of your story. It has a power that can make the difference between a good screenplay and a great one. It's essential for your script.
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Screenwriting is Telling a Story Cinematically
Slumdog Millionaire.
Screenwriter: Simon Beaufoy.
Director: Danny Boyle.
Loveleen Tandan (co-director: India).
Celador Films. Film4.
SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE DVD
THE MULTI-AWARD WINNER OF 2009
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IT'S ON BLU-RAY TOO( You only have to see the multi-Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire to understand what makes visual grammar so powerful. Think of the movie and the chances are you'll have the sumptious or horrific visual images spring into your mind. A movie starts with a script. It's the springboard for all the processes that come after. That's why it has to be strong in every aspect.
Screenwriting is telling a story cinematically and the visuals are so important a part of that, the skills required to master this element of screenwriting are crucial.
But it is woefully underestimated in most screenwriting books. Part of the problem is that there is often some uncertainty about what visual grammar screenwriting means. It's what the writer uses to tell the story in cinematic terms, but what exactly does that mean?
Screenwriting Visual Grammar
To Create
A Compelling World
It isn’t about doing the director’s job of choosing camera angles and so on. That isn’t what visual grammar in screenwriting involves.
It does include technicals such as using
montage
indicating parallel time such as how to convey two plots moving towards a meeting point of the two, intercutting sequences, and so on.
It is also to do with
use of flashback
voice over
and special effects.
These require careful thought and judgement, of course. But it's the 'non-technical' aspects of visual grammar that I want to look at here. Because it is this subject that is often misunderstood.
READ SIMON BEAUFOY'S OSCAR-WINNING
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I would say that its overall function is to do with creating an absolutely compelling world for the characters to live in.
>It’s about using visual imagery to bring the world of the story alive to the audience.
How a writer does this involves finding ways to make that world a vivid, palpable presence.
It can be evoking something as huge as an epic landscape or as tiny as the colour of a character’s tie.
It may be choosing whether a scene occurs at night or in daytime, dusk or first light.
Describing the outside of a character’s home, or the contents of a fridge, where one word on the page says almost everything we need to know about a character.
Brokeback Mountain Screenwriters: Larry McMurty and Diana Ossana.
Director: Ang Lee. Focus Features.
Think of Alan Ball’s American Beauty where Annette Bening’s character wears gardening gloves and clogs that match. And how Kevin Spacey’s Lester Burnham’s rebellion against her immaculate homemaking by messing up her expensive couch tells us so much about his transformation.
Character, Story, Emotional Plot – are all being served here by the superb screenwriting. Visual grammar can be positively loaded with meaningful eloquence.
Annette Bening and Kevin Spacey
in American Beauty. Screenwriter:
Alan Ball. Director:Sam Mendes. DreamWorks SKG
In screenwriting, visual grammar at its best can also carry a whole weight of meaning by means of a single object.
Think of Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurth and his cattle gun in the Coens Brothers’
No Country for Old Men.
Javier Bardem in
No Country For Old Men. Screenwriters/directors:
Ethan and Joel Coen. Paramount Vantage.
Screenwriting
Visual Grammar:
Expressing the Emotional Plot
Visual grammar’s also about using the natural elements - rain or snow, sun or deepening shade to reflect or contrast the characters’ emotions. Visual story-telling is as much concerned with character as it is with setting.
It plays a vital role in expressing the emotional plot. How a character inhabits their world can convey so much about their emotional journey.
Think of Jack and Ennis undergoing their transformation of identity in the wilderness of
Brokeback Mountain.
As with all aspects of distinctive screenwriting, visual grammar has to be subtle rather than obvious. Just like avoiding on-the-nose-dialogue, the meaning that is being conveyed by the visuals has to be communicated in such a way that the audience is hardly aware of it. The mark of great screenwriting is visual grammar that expresses a powerful sense of the relationship between place and character.
Learning the skills of screenwriting visual grammar with economy and incisive touches is one of the most valuable things a screenwriter can do.
A writer spends so much time on the thinking and preparation when it comes to story and character, but in creating the blueprint for a movie in your screenwriting, visual grammar requires just as much groundwork. Learning to think cinematically is absolutely vital.
The wonderful and exhilarating aspect of doing this is that really imagining the visuals as you create your screenplay makes the whole thing easier to write.
It’s like having the shackles taken off. In screenwriting, visual grammar, for all its intimidating and dry connotations can let you take wing. It is a truly liberating experience.
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And receive
YOUR FREE UNIQUE GUIDE TO
SCREENWRITING
VISUAL GRAMMAR
PLUS!
As well as your free Visual Grammar Guide
I'LL REVEAL THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT THING
YOUR SCRIPT MUST HAVE
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