Great analysis, Nate! Thanks for writing and best of luck moving to L.A.

Great post. I actually like to "direct the eye." It's a visual cue that tells you what's in the center of the screen.

This si an example from a script in production I believe.

We TRACK across a table lined with boxed action figures,
carefully organized comic books, and encased baseball cards.
Everything is priced.

I would say:


The table is lined with boxed action figures, neatly-stacked comics and covered baseball cards with prices scribbled on them.


Before he passed Mystery Man had a great post about an un-produced Hitchcock film where we would take the prose and turn it into script.

Great fun that. More writers should be looking for visual descriptions that denote movement or content.

I refuse to have a non-linked transition. I will work for hours to get the right images or sounds to carry between sequences.

Thanks guys!

With you on that one, Christian. That post of MM's that I linked to in the article was an eye-opener for me when I first read that. It's one of those things that I came across in screenplays that I was reading but wasn't really...aware of what they were doing.

That opening of that draft of Blade Runner is just completely effortless. Reading that, you see how he takes you from an establishing shot to a wide angle on the scene to progressively tighter and tighter angles, and he doesn't ONCE use "director-y" language.

A director reading that can't help but imagine those shots as Fancher's writing them, and even though he'll put his own stamp on the way that scene is shot, he's already half-way there because of the way Fancher literally wrote out the shots. Fantastic.

If there's enough interest in this one, there was a metric ton of storytelling gold in that video--I'd gladly make this a weekly thing for the next couple of weeks. That Spielberg guy knows his stuff apparently.

(And thanks, Teddy. Fingers crossed.)

Yeah make it a weekly thing, Nate. I'd read that. I enjoyed your guest columns last year.

And I'll buy you a beer when you get out here. Scott has my info :)

Done. Any excuse to write about Spielberg is a good one.

Hey, thanks! I loved writing those, glad someone else enjoyed them.

And done again :). I'll take you up on that when I get out there.

Thank you Nate. It's great when unsold writers really look at the cinema of screenwriting.
If readers and executives aren't expose to visual writing they will find it difficult to recognize it. This has happened to me with contests and even readers.
Because most of us are slackers, we won't be treated like Kaufmann, but like we just didn't know.