Major Project: Writing Montages

After my tutorial with simon. It became clear that i had a lot of work to do with the script. One of the scenes i had written was fairly montage like but i hadn't written it as such and therefore i thought i should go away and do some research on this to help with the writing.

I began by thinking of programs that had big montage scenes and of course the first that sprung to mind was Rocky. I didn't want to just watch the youtube clip however of rocky training. I wanted to find out how that scene was written but found it very difficult to come across the screen play. In fact i found it difficult to come across any scripts that had a montage.

I decided to turn my attention to more in depth research into how a montage should be formatted and began reading up through various sites. The one i found most usual was this:

http://www.scriptgodsmustdie.com/2010/01/format-3-montage-vs-series-of-shots/

The idea of the montage scene was mainly because i thought that was what this sort of thing was called. It wasn't until reading up i felt that, when i thought about it, it wasn't a great amount of time passing, I'm not trying to tell a story without words, its not really a montage at all but a SERIES OF SHOTS. It's a short passing of time and will still move the story forward.

From this i needed to see how this would be formatted and found a useful example on filmmaker IQ.
http://filmmakeriq.com/lessons/a-guide-advance-screenplay-formating/

The article styled it as a montage but ultimately it is a series of shots and taking what i learnt from the previous article it would be classed as such. 

I took this research and applied it to the script by writing my series of shots in that format, making sure it was concise and made sense for the plot. My scene is a night club scene where the characters are getting progressively drunk to the point where on of the characters is very drunk. I felt it necessary as it would show their friendship and a little more about their characters without having to have to much said. From just the way one character drinks, or strikes out with a girl adds to the audience's perception of them and i think its a justified use - something that i also learnt from my research.

http://www.steves-digicams.com/knowledge-center/how-tos/filmmaking-tips/screenwriting-how-to-write-montages.html#b

I found the research helpful as it enabled me to solve the problem i was facing in a visual way by watching youtube videos of montages and then took this and looked into the formatting. This has helped my skill set because i had to think outside the box in order to solve the problem. I couldnt find any scripts so i had to find a work around that still made sure i found something that could help.