Introduction - Text 2
With the Industrial Revolution and the post-industrial revolution, the growth of mass culture and the appearance of cinema, television and video games, audiovisual narrative became a dominant cultural form. Paradoxically, the script, understood here in the narrow sense of a text setting out the story and dialogue and to which various names have been given (“screenplay,” “bible,” “design document,” etc.), remains a central document in the making of a film, a series, a game or any other audiovisual work, not only at the stage of conception and development but also at every other stage, from pre-production to post-production, filming to editing, financing to distribution.
In the present parcours, we will examine some of the techniques and technologies of scripting audiovisual narratives, in cinema of course, but also in television series and video games. First, in order to problematize the issues we will present a brief history of the script and scriptwriting which will demonstrate the diversity of terms and their uses, depending on their context and the moment in time. Second, we will examine scriptwriting manuals which, although they are purely textual and not technological (in the narrow sense of the term), have nevertheless contributed to making scriptwriting a technique, meaning a procedure that has been formalized and made reproducible and transmissible – which can, in short, be made mechanical. Third, we will take up the question of scriptwriting software and artificial intelligence algorithms, which radically automate the scripting of audiovisual narrative. We will emphasize textual forms of scriptwriting in the present parcours, but will take up non-textual forms of previsualization in a second parcours.
