What does Off-Screen (OS) mean?
Off-Screen (OS) has two distinct but related meanings in film and television production. In screenwriting, OS is a script notation indicating that a character’s voice or sound is heard but the character is not visible in the frame — used for phone conversations, voices from another room, or narration from outside the story’s present action. On set, “off-screen” also describes the physical reality of filming: an actor delivering lines off-screen is present on set but positioned outside the camera’s field of view, providing dialogue for their scene partner to react to during coverage shots. In this context, off-screen performance is an essential professional skill — the quality of an actor’s off-screen work directly affects the quality of their scene partner’s on-camera reaction shots.
