On Fri, 18 May 2001, Alison Page wrote:
steve said -
the production process involves change, however small
I asked a friend to put this question to Chris Boucher (not in connection with the current stupid argument going on)
and here is the summary of the
answer
'he puts in basic action (e.g. character enters) but generally leaves the structuring of shots and the detail of movement on set / filming to the director.
Yes, Boucher's description is I'd say pretty true. If you look at any real TV shooting scripts you will see that there may be some suggestions from the writer of how a shot should be done or what model footage to use, but not many.
Let's say Boucher has just finished writing a first draft script. He would then go through it with the director and the producer. The producer may say, "in this scene instead of having a large room, can we have a medium sized room? And instead of having Avon fighting with twenty guards, can we just have five?" The director at one point may say, "No we can do the big room, I'll use CSO. Or, instead of Avon fighting 5 guards we can just do it off screen with sound effects." Then Boucher will go off and make amendments and the director will go off and sort out the casting and book the studios, and the producer will go off and ensure the right budgets are allocated and so forth.
He might suggest
some shots, e.g. the weird bit in 'Shadow' with Cally he specified in the
script
after learning in a conversation with the visual effects guy that it was possible to do it), but a substantial amount would be down to the
director'
That having been said, the writer's role is not to be sneezed at either. The 'substantial amount' here means camera angles, set lighting, talk with the special effects boys, sorting out the location filming.
But in the end, if you sit down with a camera script and follow an episode, I have to admit that story-wise you will notice very little difference between what you are reading and what you are seeing on the screen. An actor might transpose a line, or mess up a word (some productions more than others...). He might get shot with a shotgun not a clipgun or a hair curler. But in the end, the character's just as dead as he was in the script.
Leslie Clifford