Writing, Arts & Entertainment
Writing a Script
Lesson time 18:50 min
For Ken, writing a script is an essential step towards organizing and shaping a film’s story and structure.In this lesson, he explains how to leverage all the narrative tools at your disposal—from interview bites to narration—in order to craft your script.
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Topics include: Use All the Narrative Elements at Your Disposal • Use Early Drafts to Determine Your Film’s Narrative Arc • Write With Poetic Detail • Build Structure Around Facts • Create Dimension Through Different Narrative POV • Words Are Not Set in Stone • Use Caveats When the Facts Are Missing • Case Study: The Civil War • Use Words to Fight Abstraction
Preview
Good documentary writing does the opposite of what bad documentary writing does. Bad documentary writing makes it less. It makes it castor oil. It makes it something you know is good for you, but not good-tasting. It's eating your vegetables, you know. The good writing permits it to be a whole other fluid dynamic amidst other fluid dynamics that, in their aggregate, creates something that permits you not to have a one thing, but a more than one thing, that celebrates perspective, that tolerates contradiction and undertow in characters, that is willing to not just be, this is, but, this may be also this. And there's something incredibly liberating, and there's-- you know, there's something incredibly joyous when that happens. And it isn't just the writing. It's the writing and interplay with first person voices, and how we edit those down from the whole journal, and the images, and the newsreel, and the sound effects, and the music. And all of the elements that go in there, they are all in interrelation to have all those elements in play, and to not say, oh, you can't use that element because it's not cool, or it's not right, or it's-- it's historically not good, is to limit your possibilities as a filmmaker. Put everything in, and if you don't like it, then take it out. You don't need to do any interviews anymore. You don't need to do first person voices if you don't want to. You don't even need to do narration if you don't want to. But you're going to have to do something, And filmmaking is always symphonic. That is to say, it's multiple instruments working at the same time. [PIANO AND STRING ETUDE PLAYING] For us, our films, for the most part, are written, which means that we depend, as the central skeletal structure of our film, a written narration. And I remember coming into the documentary world, inheriting the sense that direct cinema, the cinéma vérité, experimental works, were much more closer to art or to cinema than anything that was narrated. And I had a kind of initial suspicion of that, because I think I've always enjoyed literature. I've always enjoyed, you know, good nonfiction and fiction. The idea that that narration is-- the voice of God is somehow not good, and not as pure as other forms of cinema is just crazy, because most of our literature is based on third person narrative exposition, and that's pretty good. And in some of the earlier films-- I did not invent narration in films. I just figured that it ought to get a different kind of treatment, that it could have a dimension that could be at moments considered literary, and literature, and that it would not just be connecting the talking heads, connecting the dots of a didactic, expository, educational film. I cannot tell you, in an industry where quite often people are suspicious of words, how much they are central to who we are. And I would say, don't be afraid of them. It's how we're communicating right now. [PIANO AND STRING ETUDE PLAYIN...
About the Instructor
Since its 2017 debut, Ken Burns’s The Vietnam War has enthralled over 39 million viewers by painting an intimate and revealing portrait of history. In this online film class, learn how Ken captivates audiences with his ability to distill vast research and complex truths into compelling narratives. From first treatment to final edit, Ken teaches his documentary filmmaking techniques that “wake the dead” to bring their stories to life.
Featured MasterClass Instructor
Ken Burns
The 5-time Emmy Award winner teaches how he navigates research and uses audio and visual storytelling methods to bring history to life.
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