Reading and Writing a Screenplay
Fiction, Documentary and New Media, 1st Edition
By Isabelle Raynauld

Publisher: Routledge
234 pages | 53 B/W Illus.

Reading and Writing a Screenplay takes you on a journey through the many possible ways of writing, reading and imagining fiction and documentary projects for cinema, television and new media. It explores the critical role of a script as a document to be written and read with both future readers and the future film it will be giving life to in mind.

The book explores the screenplay and the screenwriting process by approaching the film script in three different ways: how it is written, how it is read and how it can be rewritten. Combining contemporary screenwriting practices with historical and academic context, Isabelle Raynauld provides key analytical tools and reading strategies for conceptualizing and scripting projects based on the impact different writing styles can have on readers, with various examples ranging from early cinema to new media and new platforms throughout.

This title offers an alternative, thought-provoking and inspiring approach to reading and writing a screenplay that is ideal for directors, producers, actors, students, aspiring screenwriters and readers interested in understanding how an effective screenplay is created.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction: The screenplay as text
1. What constitutes a "good" screenplay?
2. The screenplay as text
3. Ideas, writing in stages and types of documents
4. What does screenwriting share with editing principles?
5. Structures
6. Point of view: telling a story from a certain perspective
7. The scene
8. The character
9. Writing sound
10. Writing for documentary
11. New media, new forms of writing: towards expanded screenwriting practices
12. Reading a screenplay: reading modes from analysis to writing
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

About the Author

Isabelle Raynauld, PhD, is an award-winning screenwriter and director of fiction and documentary films. She is also Professor in Cinema at the University of Montreal, Canada, and Fellow at the Open Documentary Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She recently directed her first VR film Poetry in Motion and is currently in production with her feature documentary Music and the Brain, produced by Oscar-winning company Bunbury Films, in Montreal.