Writing for the camera

Only what can be seen and heard

The audience will never read your script. They get the picture and the sound, and nothing else. So an action line must describe something an actor can do or a camera can find.

'Mara remembers her mother and feels regret' cannot be filmed. 'Mara lifts a sari from the trunk, holds it to her face, and puts it back' can. The second gives the actor and the director something to shoot.

In On Directing Film, David Mamet argues that a film tells its story through a series of plain images set one after another. Your action lines are that series.

Sound counts too. A pressure cooker, a train horn or a phone that keeps ringing can set a place or raise tension at no cost. Write the sound at the point where the audience would hear it.

Present tense, exact verbs

Write in the present tense, because the film happens now, as we watch. Write 'Dev runs', not 'Dev ran' or 'Dev is running'.

Choose the exact verb. 'Walks' tells us little. 'Shuffles', 'strides' and 'creeps' each tell us who this person is today.

One paragraph, one image

Start a new paragraph each time the eye would move to something new. The reader then sees the film in shots without you naming a single shot.

Leave the camera to the director, even when the director is you. Do not write 'we see', 'close on' or 'the camera pans'. If a detail matters, give it a short line of its own and the close shot is implied.

The Shooting shelf is where you choose sizes and angles. The script only needs to make the reader see.

White space

Keep action paragraphs to three or four lines at most. A page with air on it reads fast, and a fast read feels like a film.

Dense blocks get skipped. If a reader skips the line where the letter is hidden, the ending will not work for them. Put the important thing on a line alone.