Until 1908, scripts were mostly written by two partners with complementary skill sets. This must have worked very well as I always find collaborating with someone with a similar vision but a different area of expertise to be extremely helpful. As the technology of filming changed, so did the nature of creating scripts and due to the film industry’s explosion of productions, film making became a production line.
The industrialisation of the script is not sustainable however and there’s been a much needed shift from script development to production development- the concept of multimodal texts, i.e communicating the idea through photography as well as a written script. This can be a way to achieve a more elaborated script that can be used very closely in production with the DOP and Director.
Workshops for people to collaborate and cooperate have always been a great idea and I think if film companies could focus first on creativity and financial gain second, it could be helpful in the future to bring together people from all aspects of film production to workshop a project.
Millard mentions that “Small films are not necessarily small in artistic or intellectual ambition”. I believe it’s about what you can do with an idea through improvising and composing to make sense of experience. This is affected by a mixture of the production techniques used, the size of the production and crew and also the technology of the time.
While the progress in technology may have lost writers the narrative of losing communication or getting lost, it has also given way to new concepts and when imagining the future from now, it has given us fabulous stories such as the Black Mirror series. There are ways to still use certain narratives, to make it difficult for characters to communicate you could have something go wrong with the technology or make it part of their character that they have a mistrust of technology, or that they are unable to use it (for a reason to do with their back story). Many Sci Fis actually test out new potential products in advance of their release so as to research the audience’s acceptance of different concepts.
Yes technological advancements such as quicker transport or easier communication would affect situations but many other technologies affect characters behaviours, for instance, a character who cares about the environment may make very different choices due to industrialisation advances. There are so many updated stories we can tell by learning from the past and incorporating it within how we portray the future.
