The Evolution of Screenwriting
How VR and AR can help us reimagine Utopia
Since I can remember, every morning at 5am, my mom would be up writing. Her discipline inspired me to follow suit at 16 (though I’d generally start several hours later). As a visual thinker and lover of cinema, I wrote everything in screenplay format. I’ve written over a dozen feature-length screenplays, most of which have been read only by a select group of friends and family. This discipline was predominantly to hone a craft and develop a routine.
Recently, however, something interesting happens when I sit down to write. I want to write narratives that involve virtual reality and augmented reality, but screenplay format seems less and less able to communicate my ideas. I wrote one VR script (or really, three scripts), Dreamwalker, loosely inspired by the biblical story of Joseph interpreting Pharaoh’s dreams, which I plan to make soon, where the person in VR can walk in and out of three different rooms. Essentially, three separate stories unfold simultaneously, yet are all connected.
In a sense, Dreamwalker embraces the Choose Your Own Adventure genre, despite its frequent association with children’s books and more recently children’s TV. The genre finally has the ability to appeal to a wider audience, because VR and AR are brimming with potential. But it’s not really the same thing as Choose Your Own Adventure. It’s something… completely new.
I ended up writing Dreamwalker in screenplay format, often confusing myself in the process, and forcing my readers to attempt to read three documents simultaneously.
Creating three separate screenplay documents and opening them all side by side is not ideal. What if I want to create a VR experience in a hotel or an office building where dozens of different stories are occurring simultaneously? The structure of writing for visual media is about to have a revolution.
In 1959, French New Wave spread the idea internationally that sometimes cinema magic can’t be planned; sometimes magic is intuitive. This idea spread like wildfire. New Waves sprung up in basically every country that had a cinema scene. Today, we still see the remnants of what we learned in the ‘60s. In the Mood for Love, the #2 film on BBC’s Top 100 Films of the 21st Century, was made without a screenplay.
John Cassavetes, often credited as the first independent American filmmaker, was very critical of the Hollywood system and its obsession with technical precision:
Art films aren’t necessarily photography. It’s feeling. If we can capture a feeling of a people, of a way of life, then we made a good picture.
Cassavetes took a medium that was run by Hollywood and brought it back to its roots by ignoring industry practices and attempting to capture authentic moments that couldn’t be scripted. The same year French New Wave began, Cassavetes started American independent filmmaking in New York City with his film, Shadows.
One of my favorite contemporary filmmakers, Jim Jarmusch, wrote an open letter to Cassavetes:
[Your films] mostly they’re about love and they take one to a far deeper place than any study of ‘narrative form.’
With the birth of independent cinema, we began to see films that looked less like entertainment and more like art; the characters were relatable, and we journeyed, learned, and grew with them. Jarmusch credits Jean-Luc Godard, perhaps the most influential filmmaker ever and one of the founders of French New Wave, for introducing a new perspective to filmmakers:
Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery — celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from — it’s where you take them to.”
Jarmusch said that in 2004. With the birth of VR and AR, his notion is more relevant than ever. I think we can take the seeds that have been planted by artists of the past and grow them to completely new places.
First, we need to rethink formatting altogether. Screenplay format already falls short for many styles of filmmaking. It will not last long for artists working in VR and AR.
Several people have asked me: what’s your favorite VR film? I’m apprehensive to answer, because it feels like asking in 1895: what’s your favorite film? You’d either say Fred Ott’s sneeze, a four-second film produced at Edison Studios about a man sneezing, or The Lumière Brothers’ Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat. These films were groundbreaking for technical innovation. In 1895, nobody would ask, What’s your favorite screenplay? because screenplays didn’t exist. All films were documentary/fiction hybrids. George Méliès is often credited for writing the first screenplay for his 1902 film, A Trip To The Moon, arguably the first cinematic masterpiece.
Maybe we’re waiting for our first VR masterpiece to understand how to approach blueprinting in this new medium?
Interestingly, the desire to blueprint new visual concepts was an impulse of Fredric Jameson, a Marxist theorist in search of solidarity. Everybody loves the idea of Utopia, but how can we all be on the same page as to what it looks like? Fredric Jameson’s 1988 essay on cognitive mapping calls for new ways to conceptualize art: “…it may well be wondered what kind of an operation this will be, to produce the concept of something we cannot imagine.”
In order to manifest a new reality, we must first communicate what that new reality would look like. VR and AR may be the technical achievements necessary to allow more fluid communication about a better world.
Sometimes our imaginations give way to technical achievements, and other times those technical achievements bring to our imaginations new opportunities for life. If VR and AR can let us choose our own adventure, maybe we can choose Utopia.
