Saturday, October 06, 2007

Here's an arcane formatting question. We all know that (V.O.) indicates voice over -- any situation where the dialog we're hearing doesn't belong to the current scene, whether it's narration, or overlapping or prelapping dialog from a connected scene, or an audio recall from another scene, or whatever.

(O.S.) on the other hand suggests a character who is offscreen. Someone who, for example, is behind the point of view character and as yet unscene, or who is off to the right or left of the camera.

You can also used (FILTER) to indicate a character on the other end of the phone line.

But what about a character who is inside a car which is onscreen? The character is technically O.S. since we can't see him. But O.S. feels odd to me because we can see exactly where the voice is supposed to be coming from.

Pro monkeys: what would you use in a situation like this? (INSIDE THE CAR), while it couldn't be clearer, seems obtrusive.

Labels: craft, format

12:46 AM

1 Comments:

(in the car) is perfectly acceptable - as the divine Ms Espenson says: "when you're faced with an unusual situation, the best way to do it is just to be as clear as possible for the reader and not worry too much about rules."

By  Dennis Venter, at 4:34 AM  

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