Dialogue: From Screen to Page
Purpose: The purpose of this exercise is for students to develop their skills of mixing dialogue with action. Also for them to practice remediating a scene from the visual to the discursive.
Description: Communication is verbal and non-verbal. In this exercise, students will learn not only the value of dialogue, but of actions to characterize.
Suggested Time: class period
Procedure: In this exercise, have students watch a 30 second to 1 minute viral video, perhaps something funny and amusing. You could also use a movie clip, but it'll need to be short. You may want to provide them with the dialogue. Have them watch the clip several times to get a sense of the nuances, particularly actions, props, and facial expressions. Then, they write. Have them add to the dialogue in way that indicates to the reader the tone and the subtler meaning the said words. Focus on how things were said, what actions were performed, how the environment came into play, or how the words characterized the speaker. How can they capture all of these different details while still maintaining a balance between dialogue and description?
Afterwards, you can talk about the affordances of each genre (if you are in ENC2135) and how the medium of film permits different things than words on a page. In their remediating process, what did they have to change, how were they constrained, what choices did they make as composers?