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Stringing the Segments of Shots Together

After spending many months going over just some of the basic camera shots and how novelists can transcribe these cinematic techniques in terms of fiction prose, you should now have a lot of great new tools in your writer’s toolbox. You’ve seen some excerpts from both movie scripts and novels that show these different shots and how they can be used to direct your reader to pay attention to the things you want them to notice.  Continue Reading…

Orchestrating the Symphony of Shots

We’ve spent much time going over camera shots, looking at various stationary and moving shots used in screenplays. If you haven’t been following my blog all year, you can click on the category Shoot Your Novel and, beginning with the first week of January, read through all the camera shots.

You’ve now seen how each particular shot can be transcribed effectively in a novel, and hopefully you now have some great tools in your writers’ toolbox that you can use to supercharge your novel and make it visually powerful. Continue Reading…

Cinematic POV—Anything but Subjective

In last week’s post I introduced the POV shot used in movie scripts. In a screenplay, when a POV shot is specified, the writer is instructing this segment of film to be shot as if looking through the eyes of a particular character (or object, as we saw in the excerpt from The Fugitive). Sound familiar? It’s exactly what novelists do all the time. But there’s a difference.

Remember, the camera has no thoughts or feelings; it only observes and records. It’s a way of shifting what the camera is seeing, but it’s not subjective. It’s wholly objective. And this, for most novelists, is a bit foreign. For, POV and subjectivity seem to go hand in hand, right? Not in screenplays. Continue Reading…

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