How to run lines without a reader

Sides arrive at eleven at night and the tape is due at nine in the morning. Nobody is awake, and the scene has four other characters in it. This is the normal case, not the emergency.

There are several ways to run a scene alone. They are not equally good, and the differences show up on camera.

Cover and reveal

The oldest method. Put a card or your hand over the page, slide it down to expose one line at a time, and try to say your line before you uncover it.

Where it works: early, when you are still learning the shape of the scene and want the words in your head at all.

Where it breaks: it trains your eyes, not your ears. You end up cueing off the visual position of a line on the page rather than off what somebody said. It also gives you unlimited time to retrieve, which is the exact habit that falls apart when a reader is actually waiting for you.

Use it for the first pass. Do not use it as your main method.

Reading both parts out loud

Tempting, and actively harmful past the first read.

Saying the other character’s lines yourself means you are never surprised, never listening, and never responding. You are performing a monologue with different voices. Worse, it locks in the rhythm of you talking continuously, so a real scene partner with different timing will throw you.

Read the whole scene aloud once to understand it. Then stop doing this.

Recording the other parts yourself

A genuine step up. Record every line except yours, leaving gaps where your lines go, then play it back and speak into the gaps.

Where it works: you get real audio cues, you have to listen, and the timing is out of your hands.

Where it breaks: the gaps are fixed. You have guessed in advance how long each of your lines will take, and you guessed wrong. Some gaps are too short and you rush; others leave you standing in silence. Re recording it every time you want a different pace is tedious enough that most people do it once and then live with it.

It also takes as long as the scene, several times over, at the exact moment you have no time.

A reader that waits for you

The problem with every method above is timing. Either you control it entirely, which teaches you nothing, or a recording controls it rigidly, which fights you.

What you actually want is what a human reader gives you: the other lines arrive, then nothing happens until you finish yours, then the next line comes. Your pace stays yours, but you still have to come in on cue.

That is what Scriptmate does. It reads every other character out loud, listens for you to finish your line, and answers when you are done. Because it follows your speech through the whole line rather than waiting for a final keyword, it keeps up whether you are solid or still half on book.

Two practical consequences:

• You can rehearse hands free. No tapping to advance, so you can move, hold a prop, or actually play the scene.
• You can use it while recording. With headphones in, the reader lines reach your ear and never reach the camera microphone, so the tape has only your voice on it.

Whichever method you use

A few things apply across all of them.

Give the other character an intention. Even a recording. Decide what they want from you in this scene, and respond to that rather than to a sound. A scene played against a neutral voice becomes neutral.

Run it at performance volume. Rehearsing quietly builds a quiet performance.

Change one thing every pass. Run it wanting something different, or faster, or to somebody who is not listening. If the scene only works one way, you have not learned it, you have set it.

Do not skip the silences. The pauses in a scene are part of it. Rushing through them alone means you will not know how long they should be when someone else is opposite you.

What to do tonight

If the sides just landed and you have one evening:

1. Read the whole thing once, out loud, all parts, for sense. Ten minutes.
2. Mark your cues. Note the last few words before each of your lines.
3. Run the scene against a reader that waits for you, three or four times. Move while you do it.
4. Sleep. This is not optional, it is where the scene consolidates.
5. Run it twice in the morning before you shoot.

That will get you further than three hours of grinding the page tonight, and you will be able to take a direction in the morning instead of clinging to one fixed reading.