Juliet John

Visual Concept Development as a Form of Scripting

Australian Film, Television and Radio School, Australia

In conventional narrative screen production, during the period of pre-production, suspended between issuing of the shooting script and the commencement of principal photography, the triumvirate of director, production designer and director of photography devise the visual concept for the project. The visual concept is a unifying device that describes how the story will be told through formal means such as lighting, composition, spatial design and colour (Barnwell 2017). To develop their ideas, a language of visual imagery is built alongside the words of the script that propels the project towards its realised audio-visual format. The reference material is drawn from a variety of sources such as art photography, fine art and design, and functions to ensure collaborators are expressing a singular unified vision for the story and characters. Parallels have been drawn between approaches to visual concept development and approaches to script development and will be examined in the context of theoretical models used in screenwriting research such as the Screen Idea and the Screen Idea System.

Juliet John is an art director with 25 years’ experience in the Australian screen industry. She has been teaching screen production at a tertiary level since 2015 and is the Program Convenor of the Master of Arts: Screen at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School in Sydney. Juliet has recently submitted her PhD thesis on visual concept development in contemporary screen production.