Screenwriting: Voice memos

A while ago I blogged about how I used a long car journey to give me time to think about how to think about certain parts of my second feature film. What I also have a tendency to do is think about the dialogue the characters would say. More often than not, I’d think of something great, but then when I get to my destination, I never can write it down exactly what I said.

Then my flatmate Rachel had a suggestion; that I should use voice memos. This was an app on my phone and you can just talk for as long as you want and then play it back later. So I set my phone up to record before I set off (safety first of course), put it on the passenger seat (obviously I couldn’t hold onto the phone when driving) and just started talking as I drove to one of my friend’s house for a catch up.

In the days afterwards I’ve been spending time listening back to what I wrote and writing it up. Although it was for a few different scenes, it’s good to have a bases for upcoming scenes which I can flesh out if need be.

I was worried the recording quality wouldn’t be able to capture what I was saying, and sometimes outside traffic was too overbearing and drowned out my voice. But for the most part it was a great app to use, and I’ll definitely use it again in the future on car journeys when I’m on my own.