Major Project: Pre-Writing - Kelly Marcel

Kelly Marcel is a British writer and actress.

She has written a variety of drama scripts for the film industry. Including 'Saving Mr Banks', 'Bronson' and 'Fifty Shades of Grey'.

One of the reasons I looked at scripts that Kelly Marcel wrote was because there were a few in the style that I was writing mine in, which was biographical/period drama. For example 'Saving Mr. Banks'. This particular script was co-written with Sue Smith, who brought the screenplay for Kelly Marcel to re-write.

There were scenes in this script that inspired me when it came to to writing the start of my script.

Here's a screenshot from the script, 'Saving Mr. Banks'. At the beginning of the scene the main character, P. L. Travers is arriving at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The description for this hotel is cleverly used, to interest the reader who is reading this script. The scriptwriter has taken something that we would see on screen boring, to imagine it in an interesting way.

Within my script I did something similar. There was a line where a character is on her way to her friends home. I wanted to describe what the character was wearing without listing it down. This is what I ended up writing, 'The bright yellow of her dress, makes her look like a firefly glowing in the dark.'

This sentence gives the reader an idea on her dress colour and that this character is out in the evening by the metaphor use of the firefly. This small sentence was about to give all that information as well as be said in an interesting way, making it more interesting for the reader to read.

Overall the main purpose I looked at 'Saving Mr. Banks', was because it was a period drama, the same genre as my script, but also because it was set in the early 1960's, also similar to my script setting. Looking at this script was research into what it would've been like in that time period but also gave me an example on how to format description and action in between dialogue. Not only did this script help me with how to write specific scenes, but also on how a script should be formatted and look, as this was a hollywood film.