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

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148 A PRACTICAL MANUAL OF SCREEN PLAYWRITING have been overlooked. Had these points been covered originally in the shooting script, the title cards would have been unnecessary. Audiences attend theaters to see pictures, not to read words. One picture shot can depict more than a dozen rolling titles. It is the screen writer's task to make certain that missing information will not have to be covered, as an afterthought, by a foreword. Fade-out fade-in transition. A very effective transitional device, that uses the momentary black screen of the fade-out as it reaches its darkest point, can be accomplished by means of camera dollies. If it is necessary, for example, to follow a dock scene with a scene in a shipping office, the transition can be effected by having the camera dolly in to a crate or a barrel, for example, so that the entire frame will be blacked out. The concluding frames of this black image are then dissolved through to the blackness of the opening frames of the succeeding office scene, where the camera may open on, perhaps, an extreme close-up of a character's back, so that the frame is again blacked out. Then either the camera can pull back or the character can move forward, to start the action and reveal the new scene and its occupants. A somewhat similar transition device was used in The 39 Steps during the chase scene, in which Robert Donat was seen to run in a head-on shot into the camera and black it out completely. This was dissolved through to another blackened screen, which turned out to be Donat's back as he ran away from the camera in a tail-end shot, thus exposing the new locale. This type of transition obviated the use of a number of repetitious "run throughs," which are transition pan or trucking shots of a character, or characters, in a chase sequence, as they crash through dense forest underbrush, stumble through murky slum streets, or run through interminable corridor mazes. Such runthrough transitions can be invaluable to connect various chase sequences, but they can become boringly repetitive, hence the need for creative variation. Run-through transitions. In the same way, to connect a scene in which someone is seen entering a car, with a succeeding scene in which he is seen arriving at his destination, it is quite often necessary to indicate auto run throughs, in which the car is seen tooling