The Filmmaker's Guide to Creatively Embracing Limitations: Not Getting What You Want Leading to Creating What You Need (for True Epub) by Pace William & Stobbe Ingrid

Author:Pace, William & Stobbe, Ingrid [Pace, William & Stobbe, Ingrid]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PERFORMING ARTS/Film & Video/General
ISBN: 9781000919684
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2024-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

6

Exercises in Limitation Storytelling on the Page

DOI: 10.4324/9781003286639-8

6.1 Starter Yeast

6.1.1 A Spare Scene Screenwriting Exercise

Do you know what the hardest part of teaching screenwriting is?

If you immediately thrust your hand skyward and didn’t wait to be called on before blurting out, “Getting students to write,” you wouldn’t be wholly wrong. That is a challenge, yes … but it actually isn’t the hardest part. The hardest part?

Getting them to have something to write about.

And we’re not even talking about big-ticket items like complex characters, big ideas and grand themes. No, we’re talking about the basics: having anything to write about. At all! Meaning they don’t have an idea for a script to write. Or, maybe more accurately, they don’t have an idea they believe is worth writing; they have no confidence in their ideas, do not believe them to be worthy of writing. Possibly some are too nervous to share what they would really like to write about, afraid of revealing veiled truths about themselves (which by the way, are usually the best screenplays to write, if anyone is asking), but I would say the majority of new screenwriters just aren’t really sure what to write about.

Our response is to give them something to utilize but – of course – loaded with restrictions: the “spare scene,” sometimes referred to as an “open scene.”

In acting classes teachers give actors a scene with very minimal, even banal, dialogue in order for them to learn how to create a character background and situation that would make such lines actually have a sense, meaning and emotional value. An example of such a scene could be something as simple as this:

1

That's it?

2

That's it.

1

Oh.

2

Oh?

1

Yeah.

2

What?

1

Nothing.

2

Right.

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