Thursday, April 13, 2006

Scene Work

The craft of filmmaking is complicated because there are so many things to master. I've talked about quite a few of them on this blog, and am always open to suggestions about things that concern you, my regular readers. E-mail or post a comment and I'll do my best to address your questions. I thank everyone who has referred a friend to the blog, seeing the numbers grow makes me want to write more and more!

Reaching into my bag of tricks, I decided to write this post about "scene work". In short, scene work is the micro-level at which a story works. In addition to understanding the interaction between plot and character, a filmmaker needs to understand the interplay within a character that gives traction to the emotional arc of the story. Following a character through the moment by moment choices that make up the meat of every scene is what attaches the audience to your story and invests them in its outcome.

I'm going to divide this bit up into a few posts which I will start tomorrow (I have some heinous budgeting work that I can no longer ignore). I haven't decided that best way to split the topic up yet, so, departing from normal template of giving teasers of the coming attractions, you'll just have to keep checking back in.... ;-)

Random asides: 1) Should I reset the template so that there are more than 3 posts up at a time? 2) Why is it that more people come to visit on Wednesday and Thursday? Is there some secret blog promotion I'm not getting?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Wednesdays and Thursday must be double coupon day!

I drop in any old time, but, hey, that's jsut me.

On a more serious note, when you talk about "scene work", are you talking about those little moments in which the character is alone and we see them doing something like blowing of stress when they've just had a confrontation? Or are you talking about things like character "tics" (for example Kyra Sedgwick's character in "Closer" has got a serious junk food habit)?

Btw, if I haven't said so before, thanks for all the good info and I'm happy to send the 7 folks who read my blog to yours.