With time being as it is on the project I felt now was the time more than ever to sit down with the script and really rip it apart so as to reduce the shoot time and to really hone in the script to 'trim the flab' of it in removing bits that aren't of huge need to the plot.
The first thing I had to do in doing this was to take every page and literally cut it up into the individual scenes, the above image is the final script order after the process of rearranging was complete, it does however highlight the crude but effective nature of what I was doing to the script. So having done this to the script (cut it up), I then categorised the scenes by importance. This was useful as it was the first step in removing excess because it allowed me to objectively look at every scene and break it down into what it was adding to the film, any scenes where the answer was very little or nothing were then added to the side and what remained was moved to another side.
Now I had two categories, useful and not useful, so I next took the useful scenes and put them in a new order that worked better around the narrative in a way that I feel would get the message across more effectively and also build the character relationships and audience perceptions of these characters in a better way. Admittedly, there was a part of me that at this point was thinking "great this could be done, with just this the film could work". This was not the case and as such I did two things.
The first thing that I did was to revisit the not useful pile and think about how tase scenes could be put back in to add something to the film or to aid the pacing. This was a little bit useful but on the whole once I had decided that these scenes no longer had a place, it was then hard to find a place for them. Though the sunset scene did prove to have a place because it broke up two scenes in the same place and aided the pace of the film which was invaluable despite the scene itself having no real impact on the narrative. The second thing which I did was to write in some more scenes involving characters other than the ones stuck in the cave, in doing this I didn't take away from the film by removing some cave scenes because the message was still being portrayed in other ways, but what I did do was reduce the stress on shooting as much as possible in the cave. The most key of these scenes was the scene whereby Rachael (the wife of the protagonist) has a conversation with the person who saves our protagonist about how Scott is doing.
This was a key addition because it helps sell the reveal at the end of the film that the saviour is in fact a doctor and the rest was merely fabricated by Scott. However, in adding these scenes and trimming the unnecessary ones, I was still not done with the script, narratively it was sound and the pacing was sorted and we had a manageable script, but the one thing left to amend was the dialogue, with the scenes being moved as they had the dialogue in parts was now disjointed or in parts nonsensical. This required me to simply rework some lines and some sections of conflict so they fit in better, this did not take a great deal to achieve in all honesty but it was still vital. The only thing left to do was take this script, rework some of the less well-written lines and then type the whole thing up again and we had our new script for Trick of the Dark, which I feel was drastically improved by focusing on trimming and honing what we had.
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