Tuesday, May 02, 2006

I'm writing a scene where two characters are IM'ing each other. How do you do that in a script? Can you physically put in how the conversation would look, or do you write it in a scene action paragraph

In the action.

Joey looks at his cell phone screen: UR SO BUSTED. He grimaces.

He keys in L8R 2 U D00D. His finger hovers over the SEND button.

5:57 PM

4 Comments:

There is also that scene in Something's Gotta Give where Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson are IM'ing each other, could be worth checking out that script as well, as Alex's example is for your cell phone texting, which could be similar.

Here is link:
http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/SomethingsGottaGive.pdf

cheers
Dave

By  Grubber, at 6:16 PM  

Your solution works well for short IM conversations that only have a couple of lines. I have worked on a screenplay that had somewhat frequent IM conversations that lasted a little longer. (Hey, it was at the center of the plot!) I had to resort to writing the actual conversations without the "he said, she said" or it would have gotten tedious and made the screenplay way too long.

By  Martine, at 7:17 PM  

On our film .COM FOR MURDER we had several conversations via IM on the computer.

We set it up as dialogue with a note that we see the conversation on the computer screen. Simple and kept the script looking clean.

It was all the stuff offscreen that cluttered up the movie...

By  Bill Cunningham, at 7:57 PM  

As an audience member, I loathe seeing a lot of computer text on the screen. It's almost as bad as the de rigeur scene in thrillers where everyone gathers around the computer to watch the clues show up on the screen. Ugh.

By  Lisa Hunter, at 4:39 PM  

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