Writing a screenplay is like designing a house: there are no definitions, no limitations, and many variations, but there are skills and experiences. There are techniques and lessons to be learned. You can't just ignore the words of the famous or the vulgar, and you shouldn't believe them all. Ultimately, you have to look at the famous plays to see what is famous, and look at your own plays to see the gaps. Shakespeare's time did not have these many rules and regulations, and Shakespeare's plays are still being performed today.
In fact, theater is an experiment. The first time I saw this is when I was a student at the University of California, Berkeley, and I was a student at the University of California, Berkeley. The novel is written in a beautiful, perfect, printed out just. Drama is not, no matter how well written, have to go through the director, the actors, through the costumes, choreography, music, play on the stage dozens of rounds, after the audience's reaction, rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. A good play must be rewritten for at least a year to several years. In this regard, any book on playwriting is not a bible, and cannot be blindly copied; its rules and regulations are all based on experience. Experience is a superposition of localized experiences, and there are times when you can't see the forest for the trees, so you can learn from it, but you can't believe in it. Everything should be used for my use, ready to break the format, and push the boundaries of the new.
But there are some basic principles that we need to know, like a house has pillars and beams, and it needs to be load-bearing and stable. Because the troupe to spend a lot of money, with many people, with a month or two of precious time, in your script on a play, like real estate developers according to your drawings to build a house. A bad script is a labor of love to the extreme. Actors direct years of training to perform the play you wrote. The audience spends a lot of money to honestly sit in a dark house, motionless, for two hours. This is very much against human normality, and demands that your play give the audience enough enjoyment to teach him that it is worth his sacrifice. In Beijing, the audience has to eat early, or else they are starving, and ride a long way to find your theater. They have to endure all these tortures to come to your theater. You have to make the audience enjoy and make him feel that all the sacrifices are worthwhile. And, next time, he will make a bigger sacrifice to come to your theater.
Your every word eats up a lot of blood, sweat, and money. Think every moment, is the word worth it?
The content of the play:
1. Characters: the main characters related to the conflict.
2. Theme: about what? It must be about something worthwhile.
3. Structure: the overall design of the story on stage.
4. Conflict: the driving force of the play.
5. set: the visual content
6. subtext: the words of the characters in moderation.
7. Ideology: your own opinions and values.
8. Voice: your own unique voice as a playwright
Before I continue, I'd like to make a few notes:
First, I've seen a few plays in this country, but I've seen a few problems. The water inside the play is a little too big, coupled with the lack of skill in the script, always call for impatience, some really waste of actors.
Secondly, by chance, wrote "theater is not art" words, cause different points of view. This is actually very good, there are no different sides of the coin, it must be false. If you've ever worried about your job, you'll understand that theater is actually an industry. Just like catering is an industry, travel agency is an industry, IT is an industry. It has to be made solidly as an industry first, before there is fertile ground for art.
Third, I feel that the script is the least "attainment" and dogmatic form of writing in literature. Look at the theater inside the play for a long time, the playwright with attainments, write something difficult to penetrate the reality, and life in the experienced amateur writers, have to penetrate the social feelings and experience. A little knowledge of the basics of the script, you can write a moving book. The first thing that China lacks is such a fascinating and moving screenplay.
So I have long had the desire to write something. I wanted to translate a book on screenplay writing, but every book I read had something I didn't agree with, or something that didn't match the reality in China. The first thing I did was to get a copy of the book, and then I was able to get a copy of the book, and then I was able to get a copy of the book, and then I was able to get a copy of the book.
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Among all the elements, I would like to emphasize the characters. Because theater and novels are different, novels are to face the reader with words, theater is to communicate with the audience with characters. Drama can not be scripted, with actors, with the audience, there is a play. Characters inside the theater, or lovely, or hateful, or annoying, with the audience not only have a storyline on the exchange, but also have a sensibility or rationality on the exchange, but also to let the audience feel, so that the audience does not have any feeling of the role of the novel like nonsense. Inside the script, the words are not the language, the playwright has to use the characters to tell the story, the characters are the real language of the script. Novels have to be lifelike with words, detailed ...... >>
What are the parts of a screenplay?
The Writing of a Screenplay
The Creator of a Screenplay - The creator of a screenplay is called a screenwriter, or respectfully, a playwright
The Content of a Screenplay - A screenplay consists mainly of character dialog (or chants) and stage cues. Stage cues generally point out the tone of the characters' speech, the action of the speech, or the characters up and down, pointing out the scene or other effects of the change and so on.
The structure of a play
A long play is often made up of a number of different paragraphs, and in different kinds of theater, different units are used to distinguish between paragraphs. In Western theater, it is common to use an Act as the larger unit, and underneath the Act there are many smaller scenes. The Chinese Yuan dynasty plays use the "Fold" as a unit, and the Southern operas use the "Out" as a unit, which represents the order of the actors' entrances and exits, but after the creation of the literati in the Ming dynasty, the "Out" was changed to the more complex "Out". The "out" is a unit representing the order in which the actors enter and leave the theater.
The structure of the script can be generally divided into "beginning, development, twist, ***, and then *** ending". Of course, according to the different skills of screenwriters, the structure will change. For example, the "good play".
Classification of scripts - according to the scope of application, can be divided into: drama scripts, movie scripts, TV scripts, etc. / according to the subject matter of the script, can be divided into comedy, tragedy, historical drama, family ethical drama, thriller and so on.
Movie script: first of all, it is not a novel, of course, it is definitely not a drama. In a novel, all the action takes place in the mind of the character - in the "mind's eye" of the dramatic action. In a play (stage play), the action and the story line take place on the stage below the front arch, and the audience is the fourth wall, eavesdropping on the secrets of the characters. The characters use language to converse about their hopes, dreams, past and future plans, discuss their needs, desires, fears, conflicts, etc. In this way, the action of the play arises out of the language of the play's dialog, which is itself a text told orally. Movies are different. Film is a visual medium that dramatizes a basic story line. It deals with images, pictures, small pieces and sections of shot film; a clock ticking, a window opening, a man looking, two guys laughing, an automobile rounding a corner, a telephone ringing, and so on. A movie script is a story told by pictures, and also includes language and descriptions that take place within its dramatic structure. A movie script is a story told by pictures. It is like a noun (noun) - it refers to a person or persons, in a place or places, going about his or her business.
All movie scripts carry out this basic premise. A feature film is a visual medium that dramatizes a basic story line. Like all stories, it has a definite beginning, middle and end. If we were to take a movie script and examine it like a painting on a wall, it would look like the chart below.
What is a Screenplay
A screenplay is the basis of a play. Scripts are divided into two categories: literary scripts and screenplays. The literary script is written by the screenwriter, and the screenplay is done by the director. As a screenwriter, you only need to provide a literary script.
The literary script can be said to be the director's material, with the literary script, the director can be based on it to complete the screenplay, shooting TV drama or movie.
The main components of a literary script are dialog and action. Dialogue goes without saying, and action refers to the events that the characters have to accomplish. It is important to note that there are only two purposes for dialogue and action, one is to promote the development of events, and the other is to express the character.
There are also classifications of TV scripts, such as drama, sitcom, and so on. If it is 45 minutes, the script is about 15,000 words, and if it is 30 minutes, 8,000 will do.
Reference:
What does a screenplay usually consist of
A screenplay usually consists of a scenario and an activity
Scenario is the background and the scene
Activity is the dialog and the action
Activity is the background and the scene. Activity refers to dialog, action, etc.
What are the types of scripts?
Classification of scripts
According to the scope of application, they can be divided into: drama scripts, movie scripts, TV scripts and so on.
According to the subject matter of the script, it can be divided into comedy, tragedy, historical drama, family ethical drama, thriller and so on.
There is also a kind of script that mainly pursues literature, not for the purpose of performance, or not suitable for performance, not enough action. Being a "desk play" to pay for the study of the drama. Many European 19th century romantic poets and writers have created a lot of poetry in this form of theater, but can only provide reading, not suitable for staging.
What are the characteristics of a play?
Literary Script Characteristics and Writing Methods ........
The script is the main body of the way of endorsement, the performance of the storyline of the literary style, the textual basis of the theater performance. In the field of literature, it is a special genre of literary works. In the field of theater practice, it is the foundation and starting point of theater activities. It is composed of dialogues, monologues, asides and stage directions of the characters in the play.
1. Space and time should be highly concentrated
The script is not like novels, essays can be free from the limitations of time and space, it requires time, characters, plots, scenes are highly concentrated in the stage range. On the small stage, a few people's performances can represent thousands of troops and horses, walk a few laps can be shown across thousands of mountains, change a scene and characters, it can be explained to a completely new place or after how many years apart ...... separated by millions of miles, across a number of years, can be through the curtain, the field change to focus on the stage show.
The script usually use "curtain" and "field" to indicate the paragraph and plot. "Act" refers to the plot development of a large paragraph. "A scene" can be divided into several scenes, "a" refers to a scene in a spatial change or time apart from the plot. Scripts are generally not too long, not too many characters, and not too many scene changes. Beginning to adapt a short textbook play, it is best to write a short one-act play.
2. Reflect the real-life conflicts to be sharp and prominent
All kinds of literary works have to show the social conflicts, while the drama is required in the limited space and time to reflect the contradictions of the conflict is more sharp and prominent. Because this literary form of drama is to focus on reflecting the conflicts in real life, so that there is no conflict there is no drama. And because the script by the length and performance time limitations, so the plot reflected in the real life must be condensed in the stage performance suitable for the conflict.
The conflict in the script is roughly divided into four parts: occurrence, development, *** and conclusion. Performance from the time of conflict should attract the audience, conflict development to the most intense time called ***, when the plot is also the most attractive to the audience, the most exciting. *** part of the script and stage performance of the "main event", is the most "strong", the most need to work.
3. The language of the script to express the character
The language of the script includes two aspects of the lines and stage instructions
The language of the script is mainly lines. Lines are the words spoken by the characters in the play, including dialogues, monologues, and voice-overs. A monologue is what a character says when expressing his or her personal feelings and desires alone; an aside is what a character says to the audience from the sidelines behind the backs of other playwrights on stage. The script is mainly to promote the plot development and characterization through the lines. Therefore, the language of the lines requires to be able to fully express the character's personality, identity and thoughts and feelings, to be popular and natural, concise and clear, to be colloquial, and to be suitable for stage performances.
Stage instructions, also known as stage tips, is an indispensable part of the language of the script, is the script of some illustrative text. Stage instructions include the table of characters in the play, the time and place of the plot, costumes, props, sets, and the expression of the characters, movements, up and down, etc. These instructions are essential to the portrayal of the characters. These descriptions play a role in characterization and in promoting and developing the plot of the play. This part of the language requires concise, concise and clear writing. This part of the content generally appears in the beginning of each scene (scene). The end and the middle of the conversation, usually enclosed in brackets (square or round brackets).