Writing the Scene

Foundations: What Is a Scene?

What is a scene? What is a scene? A scene is an event that you've decided to put into this

movie because it's driving the story forward. The other variable here is, frequently, it tells us

something new about the protagonist.

So, what is a scene? It drives a story forward. It's necessary to the story. It's necessary in

being one of the dominoes that falls into the next domino, the next domino, the next domino,

and that series of dominoes makes the movie. You could certainly suggest that if you removed

one, if you remove this scene—how do you know it's worthy of being in the movie? If you

removed it, the movie would start to fall apart a little bit. It's necessary. It's necessary to telling

the story.

When you're going into this, you wanna know, who is the protagonist? Who is the

antagonist in the scene, and what are their wants? What do they need from each other? What

do they need from the scene? Because that's where the conflict is. That's what we wanna build

to.

Pushing this further, what happens to the protagonist if he or she doesn't get what they

want? That's another way of saying you wanna make sure the stakes are high. You wanna make

sure that the protagonist must win the scene. Whatever the battle is in the scene, they must

win it.
 What is a midpoint in your scene? A midpoint is when the bomb goes off. So, let's say that

the people have entered the scene, started the scene. Maybe they're being delicate with each

other, or maybe they're being conversational. There's not a lot of anxiety, but the midpoint is

when the conflict hits.

The midpoint is when the protagonist defines what he or she wants, and the other

character in the scene, the antagonist, says, "No, you can't have it." That's where the bomb

goes off. That's when the scene starts to cook. You wanna get to that midpoint quickly. You

don't wanna spend a lot of time building to that, and on that note, I'm gonna talk about

something that you may or may not have heard me talk about before, get in late, get out early.

What does get in late, get out early mean? That means that it's rare to have a scene that we

know in life, which is, you walk into a room. "Hey, how are you?"

"Good, how are you?"

"Pretty good.”

"How's your day been?" All of that stuff is not dramatic. You wanna lop that off. We wanna

get to the conflict or the midpoint pretty quickly.

Also, keep in mind that, this surprises people sometimes, most scenes in movies are about

two to 2 1/2 pages long. A six-page scene is an anomaly. It's rarely done, and if you're writing

six-page scenes, your scenes are more than twice as long as they should be. The way that you
shorten those scenes is you know what the conflict is in the scene, and you get there as quickly

as possible.