Scriptwriting, setting the scene.

Ok, so a new year in uni and new modules. This year we are doing *drum roll* script writing!

You may have guessed that from the title.

So anyhoo, we looked at the stage scene from A Streetcar Named Desire, which is as below:

Chapter One

SCENE ONE

 

The exterior of a two-story corner building on a street in New Orleans which is named Elysian Fields and runs between the L & N tracks and the river. The section is poor but, unlike corresponding sections in other American cities, it has a raffish charm. The houses are mostly white frame, weathered grey, with rickety outside stairs and galleries and quaintly ornamented gables. This building contains two flats, upstairs and down. Faded white stairs ascend to the entrances of both.

It is first dark of an evening early in May. The sky that shows around the dim white building is a peculiarly tender blue, almost a turquoise, which invests the scene with a kind of lyricism and gracefully attenuates the atmosphere of decay. You can almost feel the warm breath of the brown river beyond the river warehouses with their faint redolences of bananas and coffee. A corresponding air is evoked by the music of Negro entertainers at a barroom around the corner. In this part of New Orleans you are practically always just around the corner, or a few doors down the street, from a tinny piano being played with the infatuated fluency of brown fingers. This "blue piano" expresses the spirit of the life which goes on here.

Two women, one white and one colored, are taking the air on the steps of the building. The white woman is Eunice, who occupies the upstairs flat; the colored woman a neighbor, for New Orleans is a cosmopolitan city where there is a relatively warm and easy intermingling of races in the old part of town.

A bore the music of the "blue piano" the voices of people on the street can be heard overlapping.

 

 

This is an example of Mise-en-scène, which is an expression used to describe the design aspects of a theatre or film production, which essentially means "visual theme" or "telling a story"—both in visually artful ways through storyboarding, cinematography and stage design, and in poetically artful ways through direction (stolen from wikipedia).

 

 

And so, this is mine:

 

There are many park benches on this path, but this is the best, it has the perfect shade from the old elm, the appropriately distanced rubbish bin, not to mention the view. The three of them, the bench, the tree and the bin are arranged as if by a wedding photographer, naturally abiding by the rule of thirds as well as lending themselves admirably to a perfect depth of field. Put a frame around this scene and it would develop as a flawless photo.

Many dear-diary moments have taken place on this bench; impromptu picnics, covert embraces and first encounters. Dates have been made, hearts have been broken and problems mused on and mulled over. Over the years, this bench has been marked with many fumbled declarations of puppy love. So numerous, in fact, that they overlap each other, preserving history as rings in a tree.

From this hill-top vantage point you can see for miles, over the children in the park and the bumbling Saturday cyclists. There’s the city, sitting silver in the distance. If you were to look underneath this bench, you’d see a galaxy of aged chewing gum, but if you were to sit down, you’d have the best seat in the house. The veritable centre stalls for the stage of life, complete with perfect acoustics for the bird songs and lilting buzz of weekend humanity.

 

The perambulating scent of summer enjoys the view from this bench. He radiates green and yellow smells; cut grass, sunscreen and coconut-scented high hopes, before lolling among the daises and dandelions, basking in the heady, lazy light of the afternoon.

 

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