I took a different approach to my script of Dig Down the following day. One of the things that was discussed in the phone consultation was applying the right tone to give the screenplay the feel of a film noir. Tone was also one of the things I was scored on in the Santa Barbara Screenplay Competition, and so I felt this would be a good thing to focus on next: not just individual things throughout the script, but something that would impact the entire story.
In the phone consultation, the judge had said that word choice was a great way to set the kind of feel I wanted for my story. He had even given some examples of writers and some excerpts of their writing style to give my some guidance. Additionally, he had given the suggestion beyond excerpts to read through scripts of the genre I was looking to write in so that I could get a feel for creating tone in more than just a few passages.
So I downloaded a couple of screenplays, Chinatown and Bladerunner 2049, and sat down to read the latter as it was the more recent (the judge had said that the general writing style of screenplays changed every couple of years – five, I think – and so I felt it was better to read through a script that had been written in the past few years).
Although not to the extent of yesterday, I went through the script, taking notes of word choices and descriptions used throughout to create a tone and feel of the story. I felt I started to get a sense of how this could improve my own screenplay, and was even starting to get ideas for description I could use in Dig Down.
While it was a big of a light day, and although I hadn’t made any revisions to my script in the two days since my phone consultation, I felt I had never attained this level of analysis on my story, and that included all the re-writes I had made just to publish it, as well as the serials and short stories I had written about characters in this world. Though any changes I had made were superficial, I felt taking the two days to get a deeper understanding of the story and my script would help me immensely going forward.