Screenwriting: How to explain quantum mechanics

Posted on January 5, 2009 in General Screenwriting | No Comments

John August offers up some tips to help you make those difficult technical descriptions easier on you and your audience.

…One of the more common challenges faced by a screenwriter is how to explain a difficult concept that’s important to your plot. For instance, in Jurassic Park, we need to understand how the dinosaurs came to be living on that island, so that when they start running amok, we’ll feel like we’re grounded in some sense of reality.

I haven’t read Michael Crichton’s novel for Jurassic Park, but if it’s anything like his others, I suspect he spent five or more pages detailing the cloning process in exhaustive detail. You can get away with that in a book. If a reader becomes bored, she can skim ahead a few paragraphs until the story begins again. But the movie viewer is hostage,1 forced to endure whatever information is presented, whether interesting or not.

— John August | Read The Full Article