Thanks for answering my question, and providing examples in produced scripts, Scott.

Happy Thanksgiving,

- E.C. Henry from Bonney Lake, WA

Hmmm...of course it works for other genres. Example...
"Independence Day"

Little Boy wakes up Will Smith and his girlfriend saying effectively the aliens are coming.
Will Smith takes a piss, goes out to get his paper and sees the alien ships freaking all his neighbors out.

Good device used sparingly, meaning, it better be something worth the viewers interest and used to move the plot and up the tension or else it's just LAME.

I think the best spin on this device I've seen was in an old animated episode of AEON FLUX.

We see a CLOSE ON a googly-eyed frog dangling his feet in a bright red ocean...a very silly, almost child-like image. It almost makes you want to laugh.

But instead of pulling back, the image separates, becoming shell casings, a boot strap, and droplets falling into a puddle of blood. It's as if somebody had been crossing their eyes and were now uncrossing them. We've gone from very innocent to ultra-horrific.

When the shot changes, we're looking into the face of a man lying at the bottom of a stack of bullet-ridden bodies. His eyes dilate as he dies, adjusting and readjusting on the casings and we're left to only imagine that his last thought is this very carefree construct of all these horrible things he sees.

The first time I saw that it put chills up my spine. The creator, Peter Chung, is a writer and a storyboard artist. He comes up with some amazingly clever visuals if you ever want to go back and watch the old Aeon Flux shorts.

In fact, I think all the old Max Flesicher "Betty Boop" stuff is paydirt if you're looking for inspiration for clever use in visuals. It's animated, sure, but a lot of these old animators were geniuses when it came to thinking way outside the box on using visuals... light years ahead of their time.

Interesting topic, this is a comment for EC Henry specifically. Maybe it's just me, but I found your example really opaque. I've read it five times and although I sort of get it, I'm still not sure exactly what you're trying to achieve.

You start on the body, then move down to the tarmac of the overpass. So what is the body on to begin with? You can't show someone lying down without showing them lying on something. Are they lying on the tarmac already? And then they are kicked over the edge to the road below where it lands on the Ford? And you say the traffic noises come from below, but how do we see that, exactly? And if the body is being kicked off the tarmac of the overpass onto the road below, doesn't it have to get hefted over some kind of parapet wall before tumbling down. Or maybe the body starts on the parapet wall already, and then when we go down to the tarmac of the overpass- not that we'll know it's the overpass because this is a close-up shot presumably - and then switch to the view below the overpass.

Sorry, I don't mean to pull it apart, I just think if you are going to try and do something fairly smart like that, you have to be really careful that you communicate the vision that you've played out in your head countless times to someone who hasn't seen it before and must grok it from your words on the page.

Happy Thanksgiving from across the Atlantic.

Terraling,

"You can't show someone lying down without showing them lying on something."

Response: YES you can! It's called a LOW ANGLE shot just not low enough to see the cement below. (I used to specify shot types in my scipts, BUT now I'm trying to wean off that, and just SUGGEST as much in lines of description)

Glad to read my question to Scott, and the scene I offered sparked your creativity, terraling, to build a better scene than I did. I spent a grand total of about 2 minutes constructing that "grok." Whether I succeeded or not, I did state VERY CLEARLY the affects I was trying to acheive.

I wrote this scene with some of the scene building sentiments the brilliant Karl Iglesias wrote in his book, "Writing for Emotional Impact." Set up questions in each beat in a scene (page 87). IF you wanna take your own writting to a higher level I highly suggest you buy that book and muse over the issues of screenplay construction that Karl brings up...

- E.C. Henry from Bonney Lake, WA