At its best, film is all about visual storytelling. So why is it that relatively few screenwriters and filmmakers really appreciate what this means in practice? All too often, on television in particular, dialogue is used to reinforce what is already apparent. That’s the least interesting choice of the ones available to the writer at scripting stage.

What makes film a rich experience is the potential to have different layers of information present in one scene, both through the combinations and contradictions of what’s seen and what’s heard, and from the relationship of one scene to what’s previously been related in the story. At a micro level, the juxtaposition of one image to another becomes important; the famous scene of an ape throwing a bone in the sky cutting to a spaceship bridges time from the dawn of man right up to the year when the core of the story is set in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

One exercise I give students to do to sharpen their ability to think visually is to script a scene without dialogue as follows: the protagonist realises they have forgotten a significant date, and has to escape one social obligation to satisfy the more important one concerning their relationship with the person whose significant date this is.

The range of responses to this challenge proves to me that, with prompting and feedback, people can start to think of visual solutions to complex problems with ease. The first issue is the intentionally awkward business of visually representing what ‘forgetting’ means, since this is something that happens in the mind. Bringing it to life requires context and incident. One popular choice is for the protagonist to notice a date ringed on a calendar while they are, say, having breakfast, but I’m sniffy about the use of text in that approach. More interestingly, how about post arriving through the door including a combination of brown envelopes and colourful ones indicative of birthday cards? Not startling, but at any rate better.

Next there’s the business of ‘escaping a social obligation’. Coming up with a ruse to get out of work for a few minutes to buy a card and flowers is one route here, but there are others. Why not play with the emotions of the significant date and the social obligation, and have someone leaving a childrens’ party to go to a funeral, removing a red nose and white face make up to attend the service…but neglecting to remove their enormous clown shoes?

The possibilities are endless, and point to the value of exercises like this in setting constraints for the conscious mind so that the unconscious can be liberated to come up with solutions. Of course, not everyone believes they have such capabilities. Some people will tell you that they can’t think visually, for instance. At which point it’s interesting to ask them how they recognise their car say, or their partner, if they don’t have a picture of them in mind. It’s also good to stretch your visual muscles once in a while with some image streaming, a process designed by whole brain learning pioneer Win Wenger:

Close your eyes and look up to a light source. Note the patterns that start to swirl in front of your eyelids. And describe aloud what they look like, and what those colours and shapes could be. If necessary, work with someone who’ll prompt you with questions to encourage you to do this process freely and without self-censorship. Do this for up to five minutes at a time.

Image streaming is lots of fun. But be warned of one documented side-effect: it increases your IQ the more you do it. I’ve known people who swore that they couldn’t see pictures in their heads learn to image stream and get a real buzz out of doing it that helps their writing and more. What you’re doing is bridging the bits of your mind that come up with images with the part that constructs narrative…in other words, exactly the aspects of your mind that you want to engage in screenwriting. And any form of exercise that takes the form of daydreaming aloud can only be a good thing, surely.