Writing without diaoluge

alex whitmer

alex whitmer

Veteran
There's an old adage in screenwriting; If your story cannot stand on its own without dialogue, you need to rewrite it until it can. Then and only then do you have a potentially decent screenplay.

Film is a very visual art, and therefore you must write visually first. Dialogue is only there to support the story, not to drive it. When used, it needs to be clever and 'doble entender', not conversation as we understand it.

Here are four examples of shorts without dialogue, some better than others ...

Drama
http://www.ifilm.com/video/2876700/channel/shorts

Drama
http://www.ifilm.com/video/2801548/collection/242/channel/shorts

Experimental
http://www.katie-flynn.com/thelifeeffect.htm

Action
http://pointintimestudios.com/film.html

I'm collecting these to be used on my site for 'educational purposes'!. Anybody know of others?

Alex

(I spelled dialogue wrong in the title. Tee hee)

www.alexwhitmer.wordpress.com
 
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There's an old adage in screenwriting; If your story cannot stand on its own without dialogue, you need to rewrite it until it can. Then and only then do you have a potentially decent screenplay.
Click to expand...

Trying telling that to an Exec.

EJ
 
i've been working on a feature-length silent film for a couple years and it is TOUGH! But it is important to learn to write w/out dialogue because oftentimes the most important messages of films are communicated without words. Important gestures are often told through body language & many vital themes are subtle and below dialogue. It's important for a writer to be able to harness all of these.

But Quentin Tarantino has shown that you can have a movie with almost no action and all dialogue and still be popular, too, so it goes both ways.
 
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