Action!

So, I've hit my one and only combat scene in the script.  I get to write magical combat with zero special effects.  I'm pretty sure of how I want to do it, but that doesn't mean it's going to be easy.  Yes, this is going to be a low budget very short film done by a high school student with the help of his friends and the drama department.  Yes, it's probably going to be, ahem, of emerging quality.  But that doesn't mean I shouldn't try to set this up so that they have the best chance of succeeding.  So I'm keeping the melodrama down to a minimum, and this combat, when it happens, should give the director, actors and cameraman the best opportunity to make the fight look creepy and wonderfully nasty.  This is going to require quite a bit of thought and planning ahead, so that when it comes time for the director to shout 'action!' it won't turn into a silly, messy headache.  Or, if it's going to be a silly, messy,  headache, it won't be because the script called for something beyond the reach and scope of the project.

Now if we had $68 million to play with?  Oh yeah ...

Of course that sort of attitude is bass-ackwards.  It's still best to write it simple and tight.  After all, special effects may save an otherwise bad film, but no one will be fooled.  They'll always say, gee, it would have been so much better if the dialogue and the acting and, well, pretty much everything was at least as high quality as the CGI.