Model scripts and script models - Francis Vanoye

The script, unstable object

Provide a brief summary of the story, a succinct exposition of the theme. It may
to constitute a first draft of the script or to be written after the complete writing of the script even
after the filming.

The theme in one of the acceptances of the term, a brief summary that gives an idea of the plot.
narrative of the movie.

The treatment is the development of the story in a few pages with the joints of the
intrigue, its progression, the dramatic structure, and a sketch of the dialogues.

The dialogued continuity offers the distribution of the story in scenes and sequences.
description of actions and the full text of the dialogues.

The script is often confused with the dialogued continuity.

Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson since 1897, Biograph was already hiring writers to
they provided ideas, stories, and synopses that were then addressed in the form of an outline script. They
I was trying to select a theme, to build a plot and structure it into filmable episodes.
The script becomes the key piece: it constitutes the first stage in the preparation of a
movie. It is the producer who fully assumes the responsibility of the film, choosing the screenwriter and
director, actors, filming crew, etc. The director is an expert in the work mastering from
since 1914, but the division of tasks between screenwriters and directors has been common since 1911. It
choose the story, it is segmented and assigned to a director.
The script is the foundation of the narrative, it specifies the location of the settings and the list of
the characters and a page is dedicated to the synopsis numbering each shot with the description
of the action and the technical instructions. This practice was mastered in 1914 and 1931. The filming is
supports a general outline script deciding the director on the technical decoupage shortly before or
during the filming. The arrival of sound modifies the presentation of the script, in which there is a need to
integrate the dialogues, noises, and music. The script becomes current scene by scene. In
The 1920s work in reading and writing departments of the script.

The script, bad object

Situated between literature and cinema, the script is not a text. Nor is it the film. According to Pasolini,
the script is meant to disappear, to become something else. It is read from the perspective
imaginary of the film. It integrates into a multi-stage process. It has an existence and function
practice.

The script is already a staging.

It must contain elements of staging. It constitutes a set of proposals for the

development of a cinematic narrative. The script is a template for the movie that is about to
to do. It is a model, reproducing as such a certain property of the film but in another language.
It also serves to imitate.

The script as a set of content proposals

It has its origin in 3 starting points.

The embryonic or complete history, real or fictional, etc.
The starting points regarding cinema as an institution: under the responsibility of the producer,
meeting of stars, new version, decorated.
The subject, whether political, moral, sociological, aesthetic, etc.

Script and theme

It was the European authors who claimed the possibility of writing directly a
story-theme, a script in which the story and the theme are no longer distinguishable because they are
consustancial. The development of a script and the film is more akin to a process of
meetings between personal themes, emotional states, and narrative elements. The theme is
it imposes or does not exist, from the context or from the personality of an author or from the
meeting between the two. It is the result of an interaction, not of an intention.

Forms of content: action + characters

The foundation of every film, its theme, is the action and the character. Swain lists them as follows:
primary elements of a script: a character, some premises, an objective, an adversary, and a
catastrophe (climax).

The above considerations raise several observations.

a) The plausible derives from the necessary, that is, from a set of logical chains
arranged by the author. The reader-viewer will accept an event as plausible in order to
that it is inscribed in the chain of causes and effects and that the deployment of the
preparations, motivations, and justifications. The necessary derives from the arbitrary of
writer, of the functionality of the narrative and of the interdependence between all the units and
its subordination to the general idea. Beginning, middle, end.

The same happens regarding the character

c) Bordwell notes the Hollywood where the dramatic model derived from the
Aristotelian conceptions. Main effect, actions, elimination of the episodes
digressive, climax just before the denouement.

d) The neo or pseudo model leads to a number of exclusions, perfectly

further specified by the especially regulatory manuals. Among others:

The unfinished story with an open ending.

The story without a climax or whose climax is placed at the beginning of the narrative.

The story based on a juxtaposition of disconnected episodes or in changes of

orientation of the logic of causes and effects.

The story is not based on a central character.

Content forms: some structural models

The story is structured in large frameworks. The writing of the script is often associated with
game, society games, puzzle games, etc. Games also provide matrices
global fiction. The game refers to the script as combinatorial, as a combination of
situations, of character movements - pawns on a board - intrigue. It involves the
confrontation with chance or calculation. When not with a combination of both. The way in
that a script involves the viewer in its narrative and emotional machinery is similar to play,
a game that calculated the odds to manipulate the player.

The myths
Odyssey and Iliad

An odyssey suggests a journey, an itinerary, a march, while vertical history implies the
return to a point, the go and the return. The Iliads evoke a closed place that is forbidden or prohibited or
closed in which one tries to penetrate or from which one tries to exit, fights, bets, etc.

The hero's journey

Hear the call

2. Help from a spiritual guide

3. First tests. Assistance and opponents

4. Arrival at the threshold. Confrontation with the guardian of the threshold

5. Mysteries. Supreme and glorifying test

6. Reward

7. Abandonment of the instruments of power and return home.

Specific myths

Some have been expressly adapted to film, whether through their theatrical transposition or
Well, based on the text of an original script. The myth provides a chaining of
situaciones- motivos: la crisis, la visita del tentador, las resistencias, el otorgamiento y ejecución
of the contract, the discovery or awareness of the perverse nature of the agreement, the struggle with
the demon, etc. Mythological models find their true mode of operation
when they structure a symbolic dramaturgy of internal and/or external struggles and conflicts
from man to the conquest of the world, of meaning or of his personality.

The genres

It is considered here as an architext. The genre offers a repertoire of archetypal characters,

places, actions or situations. Umberto Eco proposes to call intertextual script a
series of things, namely, the number of actors, the instruments, the types of action and the
purposes.

Declinations, variations, series

It is likely that there is no completely original script or story.

The construction of the characters

At the threshold of writing a script, screenwriting manuals generally present the

next alternative: start with the story or start with the character, because if you delve deeper
in the character's history, if he is confronted with a context or situation, it will end in
finally finding a story.
The character: development, models

The classic model means the French realistic models. The silent film period ranges between
characters derived from naturalism and from melodrama or from the burlesque genre for comedians.
In Hollywood, the rules for building characters establish very early that these
they must be.

-Adapted to the story

Different from one another

Coherent

Susceptible to opposition

Build the story around a central character, one of the two prevails.
statutorily over the other.

It must have a purpose, motivations, a relationship with the story. Relationship between what it is, what
what happens to him.

It must be revealed to the viewer.

Evolves in a context.

The character model of classic cinema refers to the tragic model. The hero has a
Objective is dictated by its passion for an internal excess, by its strength and its weakness.
spiritual. They will incarnate as antagonistic characters. The essential issue is the question of the
determinations. Motivation relates to: the events that would lead to self-defense and
react. To the character, to his biography, his needs and goals, and to society.

The modern model comes from European cinema of the 1950s and has roots in the texts.
literarios. Podría subdividirse en tres conjuntos de personajes.

-the problematic character: without goals or motivation, is in crisis. Immersed in the situations,
supports events without exercising a very precise will. Acts little, is an object of
actions or reacts. Their ambiguous or ambivalent personality is drawn in relation to a
half given or through interactions with other characters.

The opaque character: he is empty of any affirmed psychological or sociological characteristic, he

it refers to certain silent films. It dates back to French scripts from the 1920s.

He not - character: is a pawn in a purely formal script game or a character-

reference, a puppet, a motif. It atomizes, it abysmalizes in the structure of the film and of the
history. Hypotheses cannot be formulated, nor can any type of feeling be experienced.
One simply attends the game of appearances, disappearances, and metamorphoses.

The Brechtian model: it reminds one of Brecht in the classic script model: the situations
they represent as if they could not be different, the characters become individual in
the etymological meaning of the term. With indivisibles by nature, shaped in a single block,
they assert themselves in the most diverse contexts and even in essence in the absence of any text. They
it tries to portray the character rather than make one believe in its reality or provoke identification
of the viewer with it. That is to reflect the awareness of its historicity of its contradictions.
The collective model: they are emblematic characters and often collective in the sense that
they only exist as a collective entity or as an exemplary member of a social category. They are
vectors, forces embodied in political struggle. Inspired by screenwriters and filmmakers
coming from the 1917 revolution.

The character: systems, constellations

The characters form a constellation or systems. Main character, secondary character and
peripheral, multiple characters and collective characters: it is about establishing a system of
differential characterizations that ensure the distinction of the characters from each other and the dynamics
of conflict and alliance relations. The processes of differentiation refer in turn to
dramatic, psychological, social, or mixed schemes.

Character, props, and set design

In a film, sets and props are meant to be seen. One must be concerned about the
integration of objects and spaces in the dynamics of actions. They have modes of
to relate

Pragmatic and functional relationships: subordinated to action and to simple characterization of

los personajes: contexto histórico, social, genero, situaciones, etc.

Expressive relationships: expressive use of decoration frequently found in theater and that can
to experience in cinema various degrees of updating, intensity, or distancing in relation to
to realism.

Dramatic relationships: it facilitates the idea of a story in the time that the character needs.
to travel through it.

Poetic and symbolic relationships: they are more global, relating to the theme of the movie and in a
close relationship with symbolic meaning.