Directing, 4th Edition

PA R T 4

AESTHETICS AND AUTHORSHIP

Part 4 (Chapters 12 through 16) concerns aesthetics, which determine how a film will look and how its story will be told. New directors tend to concentrate on the immediate hurdle—the screenplay and its dia-logue—which is content rather than form. Form, however, is how that content appears on the screen—and to be striking, it must be designed as such.

The designs latent in your screenplay start taking shape as soon as you can separate the interlocking aspects of film discourse and give each a functional name. For this, you’ll find Part 2: Screencraft helpful, in particular the film study projects in Chapter 5, “Seeing with a Moviemaker’s Eye.” An excellently graphic and user-friendly introduction to film ...