Scripting with the sports body

The article explores the ways in which the body of the actor in the sports film can be more fully accentuated through a rethinking of the relationship between their sports performance and the other cinematic elements. This focus on the actor's body will be achieved at the pre-production stage, through a short rehearsal video which represents an alternative form of scripting, known as 'scripting with the body' (Maras, 2009). This serves as an accompaniment to my unproduced screenplay, entitled Game, Set and Murder, in the genre of the sports film. The video carefully choreographs the movements of the actor as tennis player, training them to move in accordance with the camera. As a result of this previsualisation method, the actor's bodily technique is foregrounded, culminating in the cinematic construction of the heightened sports performance and the delineation of the corporeal, tactile and sensory nature of the character. On another level, scripting with the body provides the screenwriter with a more dynamic role in the filmmaking process, facilitating a more corporeal collaboration between screenwriter, actor, cinematographer, and director that could ultimately translate into an embodied, multisensory viewing experience. To this end, such an alternative scripting methodology could also have significance and practical applicability for the wider screenwriting and filmmaking practices in their attempts to make the character readily translatable from the written page onto the screen, thus suggesting new directions for exploring the relationship between words and images.