We say and believe that film is a visual medium, but images are equally essential in all our writing: from poetry to the theater. How do we use images differently when we write for the screen? And how do those changes influence the dialogue in movies?

In this workshop, first we will focus on how radically expressive images are in film. We will briefly discuss how Appalachia, for example, is represented in the movies. But our exercise will focus on how writers can suggest the mood and even ideas in the physical place we want to represent. We will practice making a setting “talk” in different ways through visuals.

Less obvious but equally valuable is how visuals require a unique use of language in film. Our second exercise will be to demonstrate how dialogue is given nuance and complexity by visual contexts like close-up, reaction, and POV shots. We also will see that—for good or ill—in film a visual can make speech redundant, even unnecessary.

As we have time, we will also consider the implications of trying to influence the director and cinematographer to follow our suggestions about camera distances and angles, even action beyond the frame.

Bio:

Gerald Wood, award-winning screenwriter and author, keeps winning awards for his latest project, The Adagio, the story of Samuel Barber’s composition, winning 13 U.S. and 9 European screenwriting competitions. Other projects include Intimacies, which won 7 screenwriting competitions and 6 as a television pilot, and an adaptation of Appalachian writer Jim Wayne Miller’s novel His First, Best Country, as the script Newfound. Wood is professor emeritus of English from Carson-Newman University and lives in New Market.