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How I Wrote the Screenplay for “Arrival” and What I Learned Doing It
- mdorazio 10y agoThis is a really great analysis of how hard it is to write a really good screenplay. As an occasional screenwriter myself, it's always frustrating when producers and directors repeatedly want to dumb down a script or "make it more exciting" to keep ADD audiences engaged. It's understandable, of course - traditional genre movies for the masses make more money, and entertainment is a business. But the fact that Eric Heisserer was able to keep everything in his screenplay at the intellectual and emotional level that he did really says something about the passion he had for the source material. Also, the note about the limitations of screenwriting software is spot on. The fact that Final Draft costs $250 and can't even support image embedding is ridiculous.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- pacaro 10y agoMy first thought was /^H\documentclass{screenplay} Edit: fixing my solidus direction.
- Keyframe 10y agoWhy would you need image embedding in screenwriting software? Scrivener would be for prototyping like that. My primary problem with FD is no support for UTF at all. Real fun writing in other languages. Sometimes even impossible. Fade In saves the day.
- SCdF 10y ago> Why would you need image embedding in screenwriting software? For the reason noted in TFA.
- Keyframe 10y agoThat's one special case and he mentioned he wouldn't do it again. Will I ever use this method in another screenplay? Maybe not. There are tools to do that differently. Often times, I need to 'decorate' a screenplay (TV) with drawings for producers and as a selling tool. It's like an illustrated screenplay. I do it in... Word. Of all things. It's not a production screenplay, so a simple copy/paste between two applications works best. Paste Courier 12pt text into Word, style it a bit and embed images. Done. If you want to have pictures follow your text, do it in Word or Scrivener (better). Scripts have a certain layout and rules which are there for a reason(s). Reasons which are important.
- wodenokoto 10y agoFrom the outside, movie scripts just looks like mono-spaced text with dialogue indented. Can you explain why one would need special software for this? What does Final Draft give the writer, that word or open office doesn't?
- andrewflnr 10y agoRoughly the same reason programmers tend to like IDEs. There are a lot of conventions around alignment, spacing, capitalization, and probably others that need to be respected in a screenplay. Specialized software makes it easier.
- Keyframe 10y agoKeeps the format consistent, yes. Also, word completion for characters, scenes, and other conventions (INT./EXT., DAY/NIGHT/... for slugs). Also, probably the most important reason, it gives you consistent numbering and revision system. This is important when doing a production breakdown. think of it as a reporting tool. There's reporting as well. How many action there is vs dialogue, how many characters and which in a scene or script, which scenes, which props per scene (not every tool does that), etc. Some of these reports are done externally in apps like MMS6 or Gorilla. You could, and people do, write screenplay in Word or whatever. Trouble arises later when you need to go through revisions and work with other people that work in those production-oriented apps. For that reason alone it's better to do it all in a specialised app.
- moflome 10y agoReplied to a sub-comment below, reposting... any feedback on how well Amazon's SaaS solution for screenwriting [0] works as a replacement for Final Draft? [0] https://storywriter.amazon.com https://storywriter.amazon.com
- skepticaldrunk 10y agoI don't have time to check it out right now, as the current project is income-generating, but I'm curious to check it out. On the face of it, it looks like a decent (albeit very simple) screenwriting tool that would be perfect for the amateur or writer/director/producer. One of the things I like about FD is that, as a contract writer, I can define elements (some shows or producers like to format sounds or chyrons or character introductions or whatever) a certain way, so I can write in a manner expedient to me and change the formatting to fit the requirements. This doesn't seem to have that capability, but I could be wrong. It certainly seems like it will get you 90% of the way there, though. I'm guessing they developed this in-house to coincide with their submission system for original content so they can standardize submissions and generate heuristics like wtallis is talking about above.
- JBlue42 10y agoI bought Fade In, which is compatible with Final Draft, and much cheaper. Works on all platforms. http://www.fadeinpro.com/ http://www.fadeinpro.com/
- enjoyitasus 10y agoGreat article on perverance and prototying, getting feedback and knowing how to challenge conventional processes.
- joggery 10y agoI like because it gives due credit to Chiang. Painfully modest though he may be, this enterprise sprang out of his imagination.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoUnlike The Martian, in case of which one likely wouldn't even know about Andy Weir if one hadn't heard of the book before.
- notadoc 10y agoI enjoyed Story Of Your Life, will have to watch Arrival when it makes it onto a streaming service.
- majewsky 10y agoI would recommend you watch it in a theater (if it's still showing where you live), if only for the spectacular soundtrack.
- rurban 10y agoI enjoyed the movie even more than the original short story "Story Of Your Life". Which is very rare. "Arrival" is not perfect, but very good. A very good intro is also http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/11/quick-how-might-the-alien-spacecraft-work/ http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/11/quick-how-might-the-a... by Stephen Wolfram who helped with some science parts on the movie. My short review: https://letterboxd.com/rurban/film/arrival-2016/1/ https://letterboxd.com/rurban/film/arrival-2016/1/
- musesum 10y agoThanks for the link. Mentioned elsewhere that Wolfram's software was used live in filming to analyze the semagraphs. But, I missed the Wolfram blog post. Am going to see the movie again particularly for that sequence (plus the Jóhann Jóhannsson soundtrack floors me).
- mos_basik 10y agoThere was a HN discussion of that blog post, as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12940364 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12940364 Also I'll chime in about the soundtrack; I loved it. Lucky me Google Play Music has it - it says I've listened to it about 9-10 times through so far.
- ravitation 10y agoIt's an interesting "interpretation" of the short story, but it trades a lot of the beautiful ideas for a more generic alien contact story, though the core plot remains the same. I said it in another comment, but I seemed to enjoy the movie less because I had read the short story.
- iandanforth 10y agoDid I black out or did the circle signature not make it into the movie? I remember the line about dreams and not being fit, but I don't remember seeing that image.
- emptybits 10y agoSaw the film last night. If you blacked out, then so did I. (Or else we're already only remembering what the heptapods want us to...) Like a lot of good sci fi I think this is one of those movies where I'd appreciate a Director's Cut or Extended Edition that includes obscure and technical and deep (read: nerdy) bits cut from wide release.
- SeanDav 10y agoThe signature scene did not make it to the film I saw, and the whole scene where she writes unaided and which is explained afterwards was a bit lacking. It should have been a pivotal moment, but was too easy to miss the significance of it. OFC my opinion.
- pronoiac 10y agoHuh, I remember reading a comment in this article, from the writer, to the effect that the circular signature didn't make it into the movie, making the blog post something of a director'a cut, but that comment isn't there now.
- gommm 10y agoIt didn't make it in the movie. The scene stopped after Louise saying "That doesn't make me unfit for the job". I actually think the circle signature shouldn't have been cut because without it, I felt that the entire scene fell a bit flat.
- iandanforth 10y agoOK, good. I totally agree. That line would have made a lot more sense, and helped clarify that section of the movie a lot had they left the signature in.
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- yodon 10y agoI may get pounded for this, but I believe the implied request for image embedding in screenwriting software in this article is an example of a reasonable customer request that should not be implemented (or at least should not be implemented in the way the customer thinks they want). Screenwriting software is ridiculously constrained. Margin sizes, line sizes, font sizes, font weights, everything, is ridiculously locked down. In the physical world, there were (are?) equally ridiculous constraints on things as minor as the binding of the scripts (which is to be done with brass "brads" [0]). It's absurd and absolutely intentional because it's what the real, ultimate customers of the screenwriting software want. The real customers of the screenwriting software are the people who read and ultimately buy the scripts, and they want all these constraints in place. 99.99% of all screenplays never get bought, and 99.9999% of purchased screenplays never make it into theaters as a film [1]. In that sort of environment, the top goal of every screenplay buyer is to avoid wasting their time on screenplays that aren't worth reading. If you send your genius script to people in Hollywood set in Helvetica or Gil Sans or whatever other font you favor, it will not get read. Period. That's an absolute deal killer for potential buyers. The reasons are a mix of process (constraining margins, font size, line spacing, font keening, etc. makes documents instantly comparable - look at the page count and you know the running time) and sociology (filmmaking is an incredibly complex and expensive multi-player art form with each project involving hundreds of people working together to build a product for millions or hundreds of millions of consumers, and the person considering buying your script wants to know do you understand how that works well enough for your idea to have a chance of surviving). It's kind of like the way I put a footnote reference in my first paragraph starting with [0] instead of [1] or * the way the rest of the world would have if they wanted to put a footnote in plain text like this, it's an early visual cue that I might be a writer who gets how HN works. Ditto for the [1] footnote around the obviously made up, quantitatively inaccurate but qualitatively accurate stats on screenplays (the WGA does occasionally publish stats on the number of people who earn a "full time salary" writing screenplays and the numbers are amazingly depressingly small). It doesn't matter how great your idea is, or how unique your personal creative vision is. If you put pictures in your screenplay, you are putting a giant HTML <blink> tag in your script that screams to every serious reader "My screenplay isn't worth your time to read, because I don't know what I'm doing." It's all well and good to be a special snowflake in your own mind, but if you want to be taken seriously in an incredibly sophisticated multi billion dollar industry where >99% of screenwriters never produce a script that gets produced, you distinguish yourself not by showing you know how to use blink tags but by showing you know how to grab people's hearts without them. If you are a writer and you must have visuals, keep it to a single page, called a one sheet, with a single powerful evocative image on it to help the people you pitch to remember the concept for your story (and then try not to use or show it). Directors are buying your script, not your visuals. When you're ready to produce and/or direct your own screenplay, then you can assemble your own visuals, but you still want to keep them out of the screenplay. Put them first in a mood board that conveys the feel of the story without the constraints of the script. Then put them in storyboards that convey the visual telling of the story at a high level (initially) to facilitate a deeper conversation with all the parties involved in the effort. Then produce a story reel, communicating the feel and pacing of the story. Or ditch them all and just make the film. The choice is yours if you are a producer/director but it's theirs if you are a writer. This is a big, complex, sophisticated industry you're working in. It's not always going to be optimized for you or your needs because it's optimized for the total needs of the set of all players in the industry. All of which means please don't put images or blink tags in your screenplays and please don't put image embedding tools in your screenwriting software unless you want the people using your software to fail at their ultimate goal of having their screenplays made into actual films. [0] https://www.writersstore.com/screenplay-fasteners/ https://www.writersstore.com/screenplay-fasteners/ [1] we'll come back to this in a moment
- gwern 10y agoI'm surprised he didn't discuss his decision to turn it into a time-travel story. That's a major alteration to the plot and meaning of the story, and I'm curious when, why, and how that was made. Did he make it right from the start when he realized that he'd never be able to explain the stuff about the least-time principle and Sapir-Whorf and whatnot, or did he try and fail, or did someone else make him or what?
- curtis 10y agoI never thought "Story of Your Life" was an alien contact story. Well, I mean, it is. I definitely did not see that as the point of the story, though, but rather as a tool to tell the actual story. In that light, the change to the alien contact plotline in the movie maybe isn't such a big deal. I was happy to see that they'd preserved what I thought was the essence of story.
- ravitation 10y agoWhile I definitely agree, I do think the essence was a little muddled by the alien contact story when compared to the short story.
- sanxiyn 10y agoOf course Story of Your Life is not an alien contact story. I think what gwern is saying is not that the film turned an alien contact story to a time travel story, but the film turned a story with no time travel to a story with time travel. Story is very careful that it is just a very different (alien) perspective of mundane (no time travel) happenings. I haven't seen the film yet, but by all accounts it includes events requiring time travel (or retrocausation), which is definitely not the case in the story.
- curtis 10y agoI wouldn't describe the movie as involving time travel, but you could make a case that it involves retrocausation. That's definitely different than the story, and I don't really regard it as an improvement. I thought the movie was pretty good anyway, and I think it would have been hard to make a more faithful adaptation of the story. I'm happy they did as good a job as they did.
- musesum 10y agoA side benefit of the movie was that it prompted me to read Ted Chiang's story again. The first time, I had skipped past the bit about Variational Calculus. Now, I'm intrigued by Fermat's Calculus of Variations. http://www.askamathematician.com/2011/08/q-why-does-light-choose-the-path-of-least-time/ http://www.askamathematician.com/2011/08/q-why-does-light-ch... I wonder: given that a Photon travels at the speed of light, then everything happens instantaneously, from its point of view. So, is choosing the path that takes the shortest time like a standing wave?
- wyager 10y ago> So, is choosing the path that takes the shortest time like a standing wave? Note that photons don't take the shortest path; they take a variationally stationary path (not necessarily the shortest one). My suspicion is that this is because all the possible photon states are coherent along and immediately nearby that path, whereas if the path is not variationally stationary then it interferes with nearby paths. I've done very little variationally physics, however, so take this with a grain of salt.
- musesum 10y ago> My suspicion is that this is because all the possible photon states are coherent along and immediately nearby that path Well, am new to the subject, so not sure what this means. Am curious if there is any relationship between Fermat's principle of least time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat's_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat's_principle) and Quantum FFTs (https://www.quora.com/How-does-Shors-algorithm-work-in-laymans-terms https://www.quora.com/How-does-Shors-algorithm-work-in-layma...)
- wyager 10y agoMy thought is that, on a variationally stationary path, all nearby paths are of the same length. So if you have a photon leaving a point along many possible paths, near the variationally stationary path the waveforms of the photon at each path will be lined up, interfering constructively. On the other hand, if the path is not variationally stationary, the waveform will drift out of phase on nearby paths (because they have different lengths) until the waves interfere with each other. I don't know enough about quantum FFTs to know if there is an analogy. However, I'm taking Aaronson's class next semester so I'll be able to tell you in a few months ;)
- powertower 10y agoStephen Wolfram worked on the language design (logograms) and wrote a lengthy post about it and making everything scientifically plausible - http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/11/quick-how-might-the-alien-spacecraft-work/ http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/11/quick-how-might-the-a...
- wyager 10y agoI was a little disappointed that they left variational physics out of the movie (which meant that the physicist character was basically useless in the movie). I understand that that's a lot harder to make accessible than basic linguistics, but (spoilers) when they discovered that the aliens only knew time-independent variational physics, that was one of the biggest "whoa dude" moments in the book.
- ravitation 10y agoIt was a little weird that a physicist spent the entire film doing linguistics.
- ilhank 10y agoThis was not a good movie or story, so I don't care.
- grzm 10y agoYou care enough to make a dismissive unsubstantive comment. Do you have specific critiques of the movie or story that might contribute to the discussion? I've heard a lot of positive comments. I'd like to hear a constructive dissenting view.
- superuser2 10y ago[Warning: Spoiler] The most direct criticism I have is that it's a slightly modified Contact with Interstellar's visual style and time-travel plot twist.
- grzm 10y agoThanks. Lots of stories are mash-ups or retellings. Sometimes a great production of a classic, well-known tale is a critical success. Is your criticism that it's not wholly original? Did you enjoy the film?
- superuser2 10y ago[Spoilers for Arrival, Contact, and Interstellar] Forget aliens for a moment. Contact is a retelling of one of the oldest stories on record: the plight of the faithful. (Wo)man encounters awe-inspring supernatural force, tells the world but can't prove it, gets dismissed as a fraud/crazy, but goes on knowing in her heart that her experience was real. The rest is implementation details. Putting a scientist in the role of prophet, and getting buy-in from science-y, atheist audiences by using aliens instead of God (you don't know that they're a God metaphor until you're on Jodie Foster's side), are precisely the kinds of intentional inversions that make adaptations of classic tales great. Present the message differently, using different tools, to appeal to different people in different ways. In theater, Anais Mitchell's Hadestown takes Orpehus and Eurydice, sets it in 20s Appalachia, and expands a story about a hero into a story about the industrialized world: Orpheus and Eruydice's light, playful hearts are nature and beauty and song, while Hades is heavy industry, the coal mines, the Man, the capitalist machine. Also gives it some awesome music. Sarah Ruhl's feminist Eurydice, from the same myth, subverts a story of a man's heroics in (trying to) rescue his damsel in distress, and transfers the agency to the damsel. These are both, in my mind, highly successful retellings. Interstellar certainly has components that you'll find elsewhere - what story doesn't? - but none of them that I can place are a huge part of its identity. I wouldn't classify it as a retelling. Arrival directly copies the setup of Contact: aliens make contact, we ingeniously decode their communication, the message is a blueprint/schematic for something that might be a weapon. Then it concatenates on the ending of Interstellar: time is non-linear, it can be transcended by the power of (love|language). It is neither faithful to nor a clever inversion of either story. It just takes half a plot from one movie, half a plot from another, and puts a different bridge in between them. I had a good time in the theater, I'd probably see it again, I just don't have as much respect for the story as I did for either Contact or Interstellar individually. The linguistics were an interesting value add, just not that powerful.
- idlewords 10y agoIt's remarkable how much better this movie was than the story it's based on [http://robertomunizdias.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Ted-Chiang-Story-of-Your-Life.pdf http://robertomunizdias.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Ted-C...]. In particular, the story has the main characters encounter their alien interlocutors almost without anxiety, or fear. The first half of the movie, on the other hand, conveys the feeling of dread wonderfully.
- ravitation 10y agoI disagree extremely strongly. I thought a lot of the tone, which made the short story so good, was lost, probably due to the medium and the audience. It became much more of a sci-fi alien thriller than a commentary on mortality. I found that, having read the short story, I enjoyed the movie less than those who had not read it.
- GavinMcG 10y agoWhy does that make it better?
- idlewords 10y agoThe story is mostly two paper characters exchanging exposition.
- Moshe_Silnorin 10y agoThe story is vastly better than the movie. The movie makes no sense. She's shown being able to act in the present on future information. This rips the heart out of the story. First, she is now morally responsible for her daughter's death, which wasn't the case in the story. More importantly, the ability to act in the present on future information is basicly a superpower. She could take over the world, win every lottery and invest that money into finding a cure for her kid's disease. Instead she lives her life exactly as if she wasn't able to act in the present on future information. In the story she experienced all her life simultaneously. She was't able to affect the timeline. She experienced every moment of her life after she learned Hexapod B simultaneously, but could no more change her future than you can change your past.
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