A practical manual of screen playwriting : for theater and television films (1952)

Record Details:

Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




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.

THE FILMIC COMPONENTS 141 at a place where there should have been intense suspense and excitement. To avoid this uncalled-for outburst, it would have been easy to plant the fact, either visually or verbally, that the fire station was close by. In that way, the audience would have been prepared for the hook and ladder's almost immediate entrance, and the undesignated time lapse would have been given a specific period of time. Transitions Time lapses constitute only one phase of the problem of motionpicture transitions, a problem which, by the way, concerns itself with the most vital of subjects— continuity. Continuity with transitions. For one of the most important ingredients of continuity is transition. Without smooth transitions, there would be no continuity. Without adequate transitions there would be no forward flow of movement, no shot, scene, and sequence interlocking, no establishment of shot interrelationships, no pervasive sense of wholeness and completion, no balance and counterbalance between the individual components— in other words, there would be no motion picture. This is so because of the peculiar nature of the motion picture, which is a compilation of hundreds of pieces of film, each varying from the other in many respects, spliced together so that the result, a motion picture, will depict a story with smooth-flowing, unified, coherent and dramatic continuity. Shot-to-shot continuity. This continuity between individual shots can be brought about by the judicious use of camera distance and angle, lighting, sound, character action, mood, and dialogue. From shot to shot, a sustained mood will serve as an efficient carry-over, for example. Matched lighting can serve the same purpose. A barred shadow from a Venetian blind can connect a long shot with a medium shot and a close-up, if the same barred shadow is seen on all three. A close-up of a person as he starts to get up from a chair can be cut in as the person reaches a halfway-up position,