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Summary - differences between literary and screen texts:
| Literary text | Moving image text |
| Audience: a private experience | Shared/collective experience |
| Audience: read in phases – reader in control | Watched in entirety (usually) action presses on – no pause to recap |
| Producer: usually written by one person | Collaborative experience |
| Text: words on a page enable imagination to create the scene | Scene is viewed on a screen – audience has sense of being inside an event |
| Text and audience: reading generally takes several sittings | Can be seen in a single sitting- generally approx 90-150 minutes to show the film |
| Text: words on the page provide information detail by detail, in the order selected by the author. | The complexity of a moving image with sound, images, colour, lighting and dialogue working together can give much detailed information all at once |
| Settings/background described with words | Settings shown through images |
| Character described using words; through dialogue; through their interactions with others | Character shown through dialogue; voice, movement, gesture, dress, make-up, props, behaviour and background in which they are placed |
| Thoughts shown through interior monologue | State of mind shown through using visual signs |
| Tenses available: past, present, future | Happens in the present – although can use flashback and flash forward to convey different timescales |
| Point of view shown through: first person, omniscient narrator, third person, interior monologue, stream of consciousness | Camera presents the point of view and passes it onto the spectator; p.o.v. of camera can change many times |
| Text generally exists first | Film adaptation:- Additions - characters, events, settings; Omissions - characters, events, settings |
