Shot Calls, Music Calls – Avoid Them, Please!

We’re still working our way through GET REPPED NOW! submissions and have noticed a tendency for Shot Calls and Music Calls. Yes, we understand you can visualize your writing so well that you know exactly what it should look and feel and sound like. However, sometimes this tendency can hurt your material and your career.

There are ways to direct the eye or the ear without upsetting prospective collaborators like a director under whose purview shot calls fall, or a producer who is concerned about how much music licensing will balloon the budget.  

SHOT CALLS

A shot call, or camera call, is when someone tells the camera, or the director, what to do in the script, such as:

CLOSE UP on Peter, unscrewing the bottle of soda.

In virtually ALL cases, these are to be avoided like the plague. Why? Because it is not the writer’s job to tell the director where to place the camera. Some directors consider this an insult, and worse, if there is an overabundance of camera calls in your script, industry types who read it will think—you guessed it—“amateur.”

In most cases, you can simply write the action without the camera calls and let the director do his job.

If for some reason it is absolutely necessary to direct the camera — for example, maybe Peter is critically injured, and we need to see his facial expression as he desperately tries to open his Mountain Dew so as to cling to the last scraps of his fading humanity, you can indicate what the camera sees using a SLUG LINE:

     PETER

     Unscrews the bottle of soda.

Now there are a few camera directions that are okay to use if employed sparingly: CLOSE ON (or TIGHT ON,) WIDE and PULL BACK TO REVEAL.

And none other than the late, great William Goldman loved his PULL BACK TO REVEALS, because they are in fact a very effective way of telling the reader we weren’t seeing the whole picture at first, but now we are, and ha!, there’s a surprise there you didn’t expect.

MUSIC CALLS

We  touched on this in last week’s newsletter. A music call is when you tell the reader what music is playing. Some writers do this in almost every scene.

Please DON’T DO THIS.

Why not? Three reasons.

1. Budget. Let’s say you write: “VAN HALEN’S ‘JUMP’ plays on the car radio.” What if Van Halen wants $1 million just to use a 10-second clip of “Jump” in the movie? Music licensing is notoriously expensive, particularly from well-known artists. There’s a reason “Stairway to Heaven” was not used in “Almost Famous.”

2. What is the producer or director doesn’t like your musical choices? Best to just avoid the matter entirely. Keep it generic. For example, you can say “a jumpin’ classic rock tune plays on the radio,” rather than “Van Halen’s ‘Jump’ plays.”

The industry expects you to know to not include them in spec scripts (unless you’re already a successful writer. Then you can do whatever you want.) Really, they’re just not generally important to the read, and they are not the writer’s purview. Best bet: just omit.