We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
48 A PRACTICAL MANUAL OF SCREEN PLAYWRITING
Suspense chase. The chase should never be permitted to go along unimpeded so that the outcome will always be known to the audience. Suspense must be added. This can be done by having the hunted just miss falling into the hunter's hands, eluding him by some accident or, preferably, by a resourceful stratagem. These episodes of near capture and near escape should be shortened— in scene length— as the action of the chase progresses, so that by the time the capture, or escape, is imminent the pacing is such that the escape or capture occurs at a high spot.
This pacing on the part of the writer can be accomplished by writing the scenes so that they will time progressively shorter and shorter; by cutting away from shots of the hunter to those of the hunted; by using the techniques of suspense outlined in the section devoted to shots.
Chase sound effects. The use of sound effects is very important to the chase— is almost an essential adjunct to it. In comedies, the rattles and bangs of the trick auto add a sort of comic verisimilitude. In the Western "hoss oprys" chase, the clop of horses' hoofs, the squeak of saddle leather, the click of hardware, the grind and groan of the swaying stagecoach, the snuffling of the horses, the punctuating pistol shots are all accouterments to the chase. In murder mysteries the use of such sound atmospherics as echoing footsteps, creaking doors, disembodied shrieks in the night, and dogs baying at the moon, can all be used to give an effect of third-dimensional chase tension. Sometimes, in suspense pictures, a desired mood can be achieved by the complete absence of sound, or by the sudden injection of a slight sound into tense silence.
The British picture It Always Rains on Sunday concluded with an astounding chase when the hero tried to escape capture by the police. It was climaxed by a terrifying melange of railroad sounds when he was cornered in a switchyard— the puff of locomotives, the click of steel rails, the screaming of sirens, the clank of boxcars—these sounds, played as a sort of aural backdrop to the chase, served to give it a sense of tense expectancy that made it the redeeming sequence of what was a pretentious and otherwise unsatisfactory picture. The section devoted to sound will suggest additional uses of this important element in chase sequences.