The Process of Making a Blockbuster Studio Script

What does the arrival of summer mean? Outdoor activities, vacations and of course, the movie season. But have you ever wondered how movies are made. What goes into making a blockbuster movie that rakes in millions of dollars? Taking into consideration production and marketing costs which amount into millions, making a profit on a film is not as easy as it sounds. One hurdle is the unpredictable public audience. As one professor of film studies said, the expectations of the public vary and there is no way of knowing exactly what they want at any given moment. Let’s take an imaginary tour of what goes around a studio script before it can be made into a blockbuster film.

In the movie business, preproduction is the groundwork of any movie and is probably the longest phase in the process. This process is the preparation stage and it begins with a story idea. A story can either be fictitious or based on real-life events. When a writer has come up with a storyline, he or she puts it down into a script. The script now becomes a screenplay and may undergo numerous revisions before it can be produced into a shooting script. The final version of the studio script will have the entire dialogue and other additional information such as the action descriptions in the movie as well as technical details guides with such things as transitions that have to be incorporated between scenes and the camera directions. While the studio script is still at this stage, it is sold to a producer.

It is now up to the producer to determine if the screenplay has potential and if he feels so, he signs up a reputable director and a famous actor or actress. The next stage is storyboarding. These are series of sketches that allow a cinematographer to know where to position the camera and it saves a lot of time during the actual shoot. Before this can be done, it will also have been determined what location to be used for filming, the interior sets to be used, costumes, lighting, makeup, sound effects and stunt work. A basic studio script can involve hundreds of people as is seen in the closing credits of the film. As one technician put it, “It takes a city of people to make a feature film.”

The next step is putting all that is on the script on film. The director closely supervises the filming of each scene. Even relatively simple scenes may take an entire day to film. Each attempt at a scene is called a take and for big scenes, it is not surprising to have up to 50 takes at the end of the shooting day. In all, it is easy to see why a movie can take up to months to film. The final leg is the postproduction of the studio script which includes addition of sound and visual effects. The film may be shown to a test audience which may include the director’s friends and colleagues before being released to theaters. So the next time you line up outside the theater to watch your favorite upcoming movie, consider what it may have taken to piece it up together.