Commissioning Bodies

The role of the writer throughout production

The writer is involved during multiple stages of production but is mostly involved at the start (pre-production) as they write the script and then redraft it. Writers can write a script and sell it to a producer or they may be approached by a producer and asked to write something. They can also write something and produce it themselves. Writing for film and TV is different to theatre as the writer has far more control in theatre and they rarely have changes made unless they approve them. In film and TV, scripts can be made by multiple people and sometimes the end script is quite different to the original one. Scripts are changed through script editing and this can be done by the original writer or someone else, depending on relationships and the format. Once a script is put into production, it goes into script lock-down and then any changes have to be  processed very specifically. What happens is the script is printed and then any pages that are changed are re-printed in another colour and coded, for example if page 12 is changed and reprinted it becomes page 12a. If the page is changed a lot, it could be 12a, 12b, 12c, etc.