Hello! This is my very first post on this forum. I am writing my first script for a short film and I tried Google my question but couldn't find any answer so I thought to ask my other fellow expert writers to help me out in this particular scene. Scene: ''A group of 7 people sitting in a lounge, fully drowned on the screens of their phones. Now the camera slowly moves in/zoom in and shows one by one all these characters. Some are busy punching text messages and some are engaged on their social media profiles. At this moment viewers can see their hands only and the screens of their phones plus the text messages they write, or the pictures they post on their social media'' Some people say that never write the camera or shot instructions on the screenplay and leave it for the director. But in my case it is important part of the story but I have no idea how to do this. Any help will be highly appreciated. Thank you in advance for any insights and for your time. Best Regards, John Alia
I always included the camera direction if it was important to the story, such "PAN TO REVEAL the killer hiding behind the shower curtain." Or SMASH CUT if I was intending to jump the scene for humorous purposes. Otherwise, the camera direction gets in the way of the narrative, which can be very tough to capture on film.
Maybe one solution could sometimes be action. Someone is seeking and seeing this and that... Then setup becomes setup with some action. It can be more interesting. And welcome to forum from another newbie.
A: This is not a setting question. B: There are two different types of scripts. There is the screenplay, which is normal, no camera shots, just basic stuff, then, there is the shooting script, which is normally done by the director, sometimes with the help of the original writer, sometimes not, as they have a tendency to edit the hell out of things.
1. Avoid writing camera directions unless you really, really need them. By the time the movie hits the screen it will have been 'rewritten' by numerous people from the actors to director to editor, all of whom change the way the movie looks. 2. You don't need it. You wrote: "A group of 7 people sitting in a lounge, fully drowned on the screens of their phones. Now the camera slowly moves in/zoom in and shows one by one all these characters. Some are busy punching text messages and some are engaged on their social media profiles. At this moment viewers can see their hands only and the screens of their phones plus the text messages they write, or the pictures they post on their social media'' All you really need is ''A group of 7 people sitting in a lounge, fully drowned the screens of their phones. Some are busy punching text messages and some are engaged on their social media profiles.'' (I'm not sure what 'fully drowned' means, but I presume it makes sense to whoever reads it) Everything else is irrelevant, because the way you said to shoot it is pretty much the way that anyone who read the paragraph would immediately think to shoot it. And a really talented director will come up with a completely different way to shoot it that you would never have thought of.
