Voice and Vision: A Creative Approach to Narrative Film and DV Production

CHAPTER 2

The Screenplay

A screenplay is the literary expression of the story, characters, actions, locations, and tone of your film written in a specialized dramatic script format. Whether you write the script yourself or work with someone else’s material, it’s important to remember that the screenplay is not the final product. It is an intermediate step in the production of a film and serves many functions in all stages of the project’s development. It is often said that the screenplay is the blueprint for the entire process of making a film, in the same way that a rendering of a house serves as the blueprint for the construction of a house. In many ways this is true; however, unlike an architectural blueprint, a screenplay should remain a ...