From Script to Screen: A Multimodal Analysis of Films

A film is the final product of a long process of screenplay writing, selection, and direction. This paper investigates the meaning-making resources of films as a multimodal composition, relying on two theories that incorporate the areas of linguistics and multimodality, namely: Reading Images and the Grammar of Visual Design and Systemic Functional Multimodal Analysis (SF-MDA). The sample under analysis was composed of ten screenplays and their films, spanning from 1990 to 2000, the era that is commonly known as modern cinema. A qualitative research design, analyzing selected film scenes and sequences, aimed at identifying the resources that make the filmic meaning, cohesion in films, and the degree of agreement between the film script as a mono-modal text and the film as a hybrid form of pictorial and auditory modes. Findings revealed that the film script does not account for everything that appears on the screen and that the meaning of a film is encoded in the screenplay and decoded in its visual and auditory resources of cinematography.