Monday, October 01, 2007

Q. I have a whole scene at the end of an episode (very important to the story) where the character is doing something along with the words to a particular song. There is no dialogue or singing, just action. How would I write that in script format? - just write the lyrics and under each sentence where there is specific action briefly describe it?

EXAMPLE: " I could just cry..." = Character is slumped in a chair with tears slowly trickling down his flushed cheeks.

Technically, what I do if I need to put song lyrics into a scene is to adapt the dialog style, put it in italics, and make sure the line breaks come where they're supposed to.

I wouldn't try to micromanage the choice of song, though. There may be rights issues. There may be budget issues. Your reader may not relate to or know the song you're putting in the scene. In fact, they may hate it.

Also, don't micromanage the action. That's really going to annoy your director and your editor. What works on the page may fail utterly onscreen. You can't really tell till you have the edited sequence in the computer and you can try different songs up against it.

I also think it's really rare that a song expresses something so precise that no other song could do it. Certainly you don't need to have someone singing "I could just cry" when a character is crying. If you're going to go to the trouble of putting a specific song on, it should bring new information to the scene. E.g. when Joe Gideon is zipped up into his body bag, dead after his failed bypass, the soundtrack has Ethel Merman belting out cheerily, "There's No Business Like Show Business!" That's counterpoint. That might be worth mentioning.

Otherwise, I would just describe the tone of the music and let it go at that. "A sad song plays as..." Or forget it. Just describe the scene and let the editor throw on a CD for ya later.

Labels: craft

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