I recently did a rewrite on a comedy I've been working on for a while... you know, the one you no longer have perspective on because you've been chipping away at it for so long?Anyway, I promised myself I would at last send it out to an old boss at production company I used to read for. I would usually have printed it out, given it a read to make sure all was in order, and then sent it off, but instead of the usual "last read" I made a PDF and did *not* read the script.
Instead, I just gave each page the once-over like I was checking out a spring catalogue. I stared at it for about ten seconds. How did it look? Too dense in the action lines? Enough white space? Any weird thing happening with the MOREs and CONT'Ds?
I was just amazed at how many of the little gremlins you catch this way: dialogue blocks given to the wrong character, paragraphs that accidentally repeat themselves, "widows", i.e. words hanging by themselves taking up valuable "page real estate" in the script.
I've now become an instant believer in the stare test. We so often read our scripts from beginning to end our brains compensate for errors on the page and read the version in our heads. The stare test shakes up that dynamic and allows you to look at things in isolation, giving you a better chance of catching errors. (Naturally, you can print and read too, but I wanted to save some trees.)
The stare test is such a quick way to make sure your "slip isn't showing" before you & your script step out into the world, I don't know how I ever lived without it.
Photo by pimpexposure
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