Blog Post 4 — Script Development for Sassie’s Friends

I fully underestimated how difficult writing a two column script would be. I’ve written scripts before. They’re not that hard, you just write down what you want the film to have in it and a general idea of what it should look like. Writing for documentary was nothing like this.

When our team was formed and we all knew what roles we had, I made the assumption of thinking that our director — the one with the directorial vision for the film — would have no problem writing the script. The thing is, the more we discussed our ideas for the film, the more we realised that we wouldn’t actually have much of a way of knowing what would happen until we actually showed up to film everything.

It’s one thing to make assumptions and to talk about what we would like, but it was very difficult to actually get words on a page because based on the observational modality we were confined to, we had no real way of knowing for sure what would happen.

With a traditional drama script, each line of dialogue for each character is marked out and set in stone. The story is apparent from day one. When writing for Sassie’s Friends, we could only put down the questions we wanted to ask, and assume what the response might be based on what we already knew of our subject — which for me personally, wasn’t a lot.

Although frustrating, looking back now, the time we set aside to write up a script was very important. It gave us a starting point. An ideal situation. A vague end product that we could then try and piece together. When we were out shooting, we had somewhat of an idea of what we were looking for, and the kinds of people we were looking for. The fact that we had all worked on it really made it easier because we were all somewhat on the same page with what kind of story we wanted to tell.

This project for me has really highlighted the importance of having a script, and knowing it well before heading into production. In my mind, we were going to show up, capture whatever happened and then come home and work out how to edit it all together and just hope it would make sense. This is a lazy and naive mentality and I’m glad I’ve become aware of this now, in a learning environment and not later on when mistakes are not tolerated.

-Beau.