Scene Tectonics: The Building Blocks of Drama
by Jeffrey Michael Bays
We live in the midst of a “gold rush” of filmmaking. It’s a time
when equipment is cheaper than ever, and an influx of directors
are out there making films, hoping to find gold. But, instead of
a precious metal they are looking for a different kind of gold –
a golden emotional connection with their audience. Without it,
their efforts will be for nothing. But, what’s the best way to
find this emotional connection?
This is the undercurrent question of my new book ‘Between the
Scenes’ as I explore how directors can use scene changes as smart
tools for provoking their audiences’ empathies. I call it scene
tectonics, a way of looking at how your scenes, sequences, and
acts fit together. Just like the Earth’s tectonic plates collide
and create earthquakes, mountains, and volcanoes, in a similar
way your scenes create drama when they’re placed together.
Scene tectonics brings your mind-set away from the
compartmentalized scenes and allows you to focus on the true
emotional exchange between character and audience. This top-down
perspective of your story forces you to look between the scenes
and the interaction of the broader puzzle pieces that your film
is comprised of.
Seeing scene boundaries as dramatic tools can open up a whole new
way of thinking about cinematic storytelling:
(1) Scenequakes
The most basic thing you can look at as director is how your
locations change from scene to scene. By shifting from a snowy
tundra to a green jungle, you’ve automatically provoked the
audience into thought at the scene transition. Your audience
perceives the new jungle location in comparison to the cold
tundra, and thus internalizes the emotion of this temperature
change.
This is a way of prompting story elements through a process
called binary opposition, where stark contrasts are generated
between two scenes through aesthetic differences (night to day,
quiet to loud, indoor to outdoor, etc.).
This is the same effect that a chess board has with its white and
black squares, making it easy for players to determine where they
can move next. If the chess board and the game pieces were all
white, the confused players would have no time to strategize.
Similarly, if there are no changes in your locations from scene
to scene, your audience will get lost as well.
(2) Impose Boundaries
Another important way scene tectonics can create drama between
your locations is to impose physical scene boundaries into the
world of your characters.
Placing walls, fences, and other obstacles around your locations
have the effect of forcing your character into drama in order to
escape the scene. Inserting doorways and gates can help them
pass through to the next scene.
Characters can even impose the boundaries on each other by
locking a door, thus preventing someone from entering the scene.
Or, a character can slam a door, creating intimidation when they
leave.
Now you can force your characters to cross those boundaries and
travel from one scene to the other. Cars, trains, and other
modes of transportation can give your characters dramatic ways to
move between scenes if the locations are far apart.
(3) Travelling Creates Emotion
Travelling through geographic space is one thing film does best,
over all the other performing arts.
When we think of travel in real life, we tend to think of
boredom. Waiting in traffic during rush hour, sitting through a
long flight – these are all moments we’d rather forget. But for
some reason, these moments of travel can be intently captivating
in a movie narrative if they are expressing a character’s
emotion.
As director, you have a choice as to whether to stay with the
character as the scene changes, follow them on an emotional
reaction, or cut away from them to let the audience feel an
absence and process what has just happened. The scene transition
is where the viewer connects on an emotional level with the
character on the screen. As a big plot revelation shifts the
story, the characters react. If the filmmaker allows us to share
in those reactions, we feel the story.
When you allow your audience to share in this hero’s reaction,
follow them out to the car, on the bus, on horseback, in a
spaceship to a different planet – this is when that audience
feels the most “at one” with the story. At this moment, the
viewer is swept away into the story, fully connected with the
events and the hero. This is the moment when you, as director,
have struck gold.
For an easy-to-use guidebook on exploring that golden connection
to your audience, see ‘Between the Scenes’ now available on
Kindle and bookstores worldwide.
Amazon and Kindle:
Barnes & Nobel and Nook:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/between-the-scenes-jeffrey-michael-bays/1115602192?ean=9781615931699
Book Depository (free shipping):
http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Between-Scenes-Jeffrey-Michael-Bays/9781615931699
—–
Jeffrey Michael Bays is author of ‘How to Turn Your Boring Movie
into a Hitchcock Thriller’ as well as ‘Between the Scenes: What
Every Film Director, Writer and Editor Should Know about Scene
Transitions.’ He is both a director and film scholar with an MA
in Cinema Studies from La Trobe University, Australia. He is
also writer and producer of XM Satellite Radio’s award-winning
drama ‘Not From Space’ (2003), recently listed by Time Out
magazine as among the top five most essential radio plays of all
time.
http://www.borgus.com
Email: info@borgus.com
Copyright (c) 2014 Peter D. Marshall / All Rights Reserved
Recent Comments