Keeping track of time
I have recently finished writing a screenplay with a friend. It takes place in present day. Towards the end of the first act, we go to a flashback, 30 years earlier to 1978, when the main character was 8 years old. After the flashback, we come back to November of the next year.
So if the beginning of the film was in December 2008, we then cut to flashback in 1978, and come back to November of 2009. How would we label, or denote this? We were going to put TITLE OVER: November of the following year.
We felt that doing this might confuse people more, in thinking that it is just one year later than the flashback. We’re confused and want to make sure the reader isn’t confused.
It’s not clear from your example whether it’s important that the reader (and ultimately the viewer) know that it’s specifically 2008 — for instance, that it’s an election year. Most likely, it’s not important at all. The story is just set in “present day,” which happens to be 2008 or 2009. So I’d avoid any mention of the year except for the flashback, which is mostly to give a sense of relative ages and period setting.
Specifically, I’d recommend the following:
- Don’t say anything about the year until the flashback.
- Before that, if it’s important that it be December, give us a concrete visual (e.g. Christmas shopping) that lets us know the month, rather than a title over.
- For the flashback, don’t do a title over for the year. Just include [1978] in the sluglines.
- When you return to the present, mark [PRESENT DAY] in the first slugline. You don’t need to continue it after that.
- If you need to show that 11 months have passed, give us a clear story indicator. Something or someone has grown or changed in the interim. (If nothing has changed, why are you jumping forward anyway?)
A project I’m currently writing moves forward a lot in time, much in the way The Godfather or Goodfellas does. At first, my instinct was to carefully label all the time cuts, but it quickly became clear that what mattered wasn’t the months but the forward progress of the story. Readers can keep up with you if they’re engaged.
10 Responses to “Keeping track of time”
Leave a Reply
RSS feed for comments on this article.
Get a Gravatar. They're free and work on lots of different sites.
August 18th, 2008 at 10:50 am
Here’s a continuation question:
Are there instances you’ve encountered where you are attempting to add info to the slugline that causes it to be too long for one line?
For example, if the location itself took up lots of space and, along with INT and NIGHT, the slugline already stretched across the page…then you add PRESENT DAY, and part of the slug moves to the next line so it reads:
INT. HUDSUCKER STATE PENITENTIARY — NIGHT [PRESENT DAY]
Or something along those lines, you see what I mean. On one hand, it isn’t a huge deal to have the slug run over onto another line, but it eats up page space and looks clunky. I would argue most times this won’t be an issue, but when it is, it should be fixed. OR, is it better to have it run over in order to keep the slug line info intact for easier breakdown, etc… ?
August 19th, 2008 at 1:15 am
This reminded me of an excellent device for denoting a long period of time passing used in the movie ‘Lars and the real girl’. The sister-in-law suddenly appeared on screen at one point looking pregnant and got more pregnant as the story progressed. Nothing much was mentioned of this at all, it was not part of the story and seemingly unimportant. With my screenwriters hat on I always assumed this was purely a plot device to show us this story was taking place over a fairly long period of time (rather important if we are to believe the premise the movie is selling us). I thought it was genius and very well done.
I have a mental note to look at doing something similar when I need it. Anything that the viewer knows takes a long period of time to make, build or produce and feature it in progress at certain moments. Or even jump straight to the finished article if you need a quick jump forward in time.
August 19th, 2008 at 5:40 am
Hi John!
I’ve discovered your blog through another one from a spanish screenwriter, Daniel Castro (http://guionistaenchamberi.blogspot.com/), in which he translated your distribution experience with The Nines (it hasn’t been released yet in Spain).
I’m one of the writers of the spanish movie website Las Horas Perdidas (www.lashorasperdidas.com), and it would be great to make an interview to you. I haven’t seen your movie yet but I remember that i was interested on it during past years Sundance Festival, when some websites where focusing on it.
I hope it will be released here in Spain, but if don’t, it also would be great to make that intervew to you. I have been reading your blog today and it’s fool of good ideas, great advices and a lot of wood and specific tricks for moviemaking and writting. I’ve studied in a film school in Madrid and I appreciate this things.
August 19th, 2008 at 9:43 am
That time jump just feels jarring and unnatural. If you’re going into a flashback, you should try to come back to a contiguous “present”. What you’re effectively doing is ignoring what you’ve already established as the “present” and jumping straight into the “future” - and you risk losing the audience’s interest/connection to the story. You’ve just robbed them of 11 months of story-time. But if you really have to skip around like PRESENT->PAST->FUTURE, then you definitely need to make it seem intentional and portentous somehow. Emphasize (in the first few shots) how much has changed in the last 11 months. Funny or dramatic (or political) changes are all good.
August 20th, 2008 at 10:01 am
What about the readers who are not engaged? Some of them might even be single, mind you.
August 20th, 2008 at 11:32 am
@Donovan, I disagree. As long as the logic holds, people won’t miss a thing. We don’t need to stay with a story in real time to stay engaged. In other words, its not the 11 months of missed story time that matters, it’s whether they deliver the significant story events whenever they occur. In fact, there are time cuts in movies all the time and if nothing of story significance happens in those 11 months no one will care. Odds are this writer is hyper-aware of the time period because he/she is working hard on story logic. As long as that works (and he handles the jumps well) it’ll be fine.
August 20th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
I agree with Paula–There’s no need to worry about robbing the viewer of 11 months of story-time. This also allows for a bit of mystery, since now we might need to “catch up” with the characters a little bit… This helps keep interest up, not down, as long as the writing is good.
Unless something important to the story happened in those 11 months that we must SEE, then I say jump ahead with the speed of Mercury!
And putting [Present Day] in the slugline upon returning from the flashback, even if it’s later than when we left–technically it’s still Present Day–should be enough for readers…this is where some sort of visual cue (like the pregnancy in Lars) or story element will help tip the audience that some time has passed since we packed up and left for Flashbackville…
August 21st, 2008 at 3:45 am
I agree with both Paula and Donovan though. I get Donovan’s point, because if everything looks exactly the same 11 months later (same setting still, etc.) then it’s going to be jarring and weird.
The story really has to jump, sometimes a lot (like what Donovan and John said) but at the same time there should be an indication of it in the SETTING. For example, in Heroes (was the episode Five Years Gone?) there was this part where NYC is already blown up, Hiro’s all grown up and emo cos his best friend died, etc etc. That’s the jump we’re talking about, which is cool and captivating. But 11 months (unlike 5 years in Heroes) isn’t a lot to jump with. And that could make the logical leap boring.
At the same time, Paula’s right too. The reason why we’re not that out of sync with that Heroes episode is because there were enough clues THROUGHOUT the ENTIRE SEASON that already prepped us, the audience, for the leap, i.e. what would happen if NYC went kaboom, if Claire died, if no one managed to save the world at all. It became sort of an ALTERNATIVE, presenting us the COULD-HAVE in the storyline all this time, which is why we didn’t get lost. The earlier events in said script need to foreshadow the jump that will happen later on.
August 21st, 2008 at 4:01 am
Further Note:
There are also other films (I realize my example of Heroes may not be accurate because, well, it’s not over and done in 2 hours) like AI, or Titanic (those are the classics) that make use of time-shifting back and forth quite well.
Again, you’d notice that these films make the time shift most prominent in terms of setting: AI - The world has froze over, with Haley Joel’s character stuck under the frozen sea; Titanic - Most obviously, the ship has sunk, and the story is being told from inside a submarine, which did not look as cool and compact back in the 1920s. Again, you’d notice the great time differences. Usually time shifts that span 11 months aren’t major to the plotline, it could perhaps be something of an epilogue (like in Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants) or even if they’re flashforwards, there’s usually a sort of abrupt and immense elevation in time period to make the time shift seem longer (like how the Lost arc spans over a few months, but it seems so much more to us. I should stop using TV examples in this post.)
August 21st, 2008 at 6:12 am
I agree with Donovan. Establishing one time-period as the present (Time-A), then going into a flashback (Time-B), and then going straight from that flashback into a flashforward from the original present (Time-A+11) without ever making a stop in the original present (Time-A) is needlessly confusing.
If you can avoid it, I think you should do so.