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Film & Television vocabulary · Pre-Production and Scripts

Dialogue

Meaning in film & television, with examples

/ˈdaɪəlɒɡ/nounCore term

In film & television, dialogue means: The words that characters speak to each other in a film, series or play.

In Turkish: diyalog, konuşmalar, replikler

How it is used

Writers write dialogue, actors deliver it and sound teams record and clean it. Dialogue can be natural, sharp, stiff or on the nose (too direct). One sentence or speech of an actor is a line: learn your lines, forget a line.

Example sentences

  1. The dialogue in this scene is too long; let the actors' faces do the work.

  2. We lost some dialogue because of the wind, so we'll need to re-record it.

Common collocations

  • write dialogue
  • natural dialogue
  • dialogue scene
  • line of dialogue
  • dialogue editor
  • scriptThe written text of a film, TV show or play, with the dialogue, the action and the scene descriptions that the cast and crew follow.
  • screenplayThe written plan of a film in a standard format, with scene headings, descriptions of action, character names and dialogue.
  • ADRAutomated dialogue replacement: re-recording an actor's lines in a studio after the shoot while they watch the scene, to replace bad or changed dialogue.
  • subtitlesWritten text at the bottom of the screen that translates or shows the dialogue, so viewers can read what is being said.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Pre-Production and Scripts

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