Being a Better Writer: Don't Neglect Your Backdrop · 5:51pm Feb 7th, 2017
Apologies for the delay. My other job scheduled me for several Mondays in a row, and I wasn’t able to get this post done well enough in advance to make the release date. Next week’s post should be done more in advance, however.
There was a post I made here, once, where I brought up the “painted on backdrop.”
If you’ve not seen a lot of old movies, this may take a small bit of explaining, but not much. But in the days before computers, if you wanted to shoot a scene someplace and make it look like somewhere very different (say, your desert lot was perfect for the shoot, but didn’t have the canyon-filled background you needed), you didn’t need to travel somewhere expensive. Instead you would just use a cleverly design backdrop, a piece of canvas with the background you wanted painted over it. Carefully, mind you, so that shadows and whatnot lined up.
Now, sometimes, especially for a film that had either lower production values or was designed to mimic a stage production (such as a musical, where backdrops are a part of the charm), you could clearly see that the characters were interacting in front of the backdrop. But for a lot of other productions, sometimes you would be hard-pressed to tell that what you were seeing wasn’t real.
None of this is news to anyone who’s seen an old movie, or has any familiarity with practical effects. Oftentimes it’s very impressive to see the “how it was done” for an old film and discover what was a special effect, or a model, etc, etc. It’s impressive how often we were all fooled by something!
Okay, okay, so what does this have to do with writing? Good question! Obviously we don’t have painted backdrops.
Or do we?
Follow the paint trail over at Unusual Things!
I find myself struggling with scene description rather often. In that I don't want to bother with it at all. While I've seen some beautiful moods and scenes set up by descriptions, I usually don't feel like any of my descriptions could live up to something like that and just want to get past them to get to the action of the scene, whether it's conflict or dialogue or inner monologue.
I... doubt I should replace standard scene setting with this, although I'm sure to be happy to include it as a supplement.
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This whole post is meant as a supplement, rather than full rebuild. It's about refining detail already meant to be included.
After all, a movie scene without a backdrop would be painfully obvious. We're already assuming that one will be there.