AKA – what I learned about writing from watching DVD’s.

Okay, so technically the word ‘free’ doesn’t belong in the title of this post. It’s uncessecary, unneeded, extranious, redundant. You get the point.

Which is my point. Recently we’ve started watching the special features parts of our DVD’s more and more. The documentaries are frequently educational. Though we don’t really watch the commentary much.

But my favorite part is the deleted scenes. Frequently they either lead-in or end with a snippet that made it into the movie, but sometimes they’re entire scenes that just got cut. I love even more when they have the director’s commentary with them, so I know why they got cut.

I can tell with each scene how it would have added to the movie. There’s sometimes little snippets of information that make other parts of the film make more sense. Frequently it’s a dialogue exchange that just got shortened, and is a lot of fun to listen to but the story didn’t lapse without it.

I love watching these scenes because it’s a great reminder of what goes into editing and revising. It’s not just about cleaning up sentence fragments or clarifying things, it’s about tightening. Every single word counts. Something I haven’t fully learned to implement yet, but I’m getting better.

Do you ever watch the extras on movies, or are you all about the theater experience and/or just in it for the feature film?