The Art & Science of Screenwriting with Susannah Part 3

This week we analysed Scene and Narrative Structure

The first we looked at in the session was Andrew Thomas Huang’s; Solipsist a piece that I have come across a few times before that still never fails to captivate me. 

We looked at this experimental piece of filmmaking in order to understand that the three act structure to filmmaking can be applied almost anywhere. We talked about how the audience subconsciously bring is with them when they watch a move and with this in mind if we wanted to veer away from the structure to do it with caution, otherwise use it well.

We then tried to articulate our own films in terms of structure on graph, based on the highs, the lows and the plodding along of the plot. When plotted my was a big like a roller coaster; waves/hills going up and down. It was suggested to make it more “peaky” like a mountain so that events were more dramatic and the audience could differentiate between two sides on an enticing incident. Susannah also mentioned that due to the plot of my film I should try and take into consideration the triangle we were talking about last week whereby you as a Filmmaker play with the Character and Audience expectations.

We then had a look at the seduction scene in the movie The Graduate.

This showed how the director used the three act structure within one scene. The framing and shots were all very tidy and although it was filmed in a hotel room the space doesn’t feel small due to the angles the camera was placed in.

We talked a little about a shooting schedule and what to film on certain days. In this example we were discussing within the realms of a five day shoot.

Day1: Minor shots to get everyone warmed up as this is where the most mistakes are made that you learn from, the cast and crew get used to one another.

Day 2/3: Where you would film the major scenes and biggest chunks of acting as everyone in in their stride after getting through the first warm up day/s.

Day 4/5: Move on to smaller scale things, such as filming in a studio and doing effects as by now everyone can see the finish line and morale sags a little as people want to be finished

Finally we looked at a scene from the script “Magnolia” where we analysed how the dialogue played out between the two characters and how there was a sort of push and pull cat and mouse effect, as one character would say something and their demeanour would change depending on the response. We need to fully interrogate our scripts and always know the answer to any question thrown at it and know the reaction you want from people in terms of what they see and how they feel.