Show, Don’t Tell (Part 2)

“The aesthetics of film are 80 percent visual, 20 percent auditory…The best advice for writing film dialogue is don’t.  Never write a line of dialogue when you can create a visual expression.”
Robert McKee
Story

“The silent pictures were the purest form of cinema; the only thing they lacked was the sound of people talking and the noises. But this slight imperfection did not warrant the major changes that sound brought in. In many of the films now being made, there is very little cinema. They are mostly what I call ‘photographs of people talking.’ When we tell a story in cinema, we should resort to dialogue only when it’s impossible to do otherwise. I always try first to tell a story in the cinematic way, through a succession of shots and bits of film in between… To me, one of the cardinal sins for a scriptwriter, when he runs into some difficulty, is to say ‘We can cover that by a line of dialogue.’ Dialogue should simply be a sound among sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms.”
Alfred Hitchcock

Hitchcock did a pretty good job himself of telling visual stories. Watch the great filmmakers and see how they do a masterful job of showing, not telling. And great examples are not  just found in the old classics films of Chaplin, Hitchcock and John Ford— but right up to modern times with the good folks at Pixar.

Scott W. Smith