The scene is the emotion. The emotion is the scene.
Movies are an emotion delivery system. This is the point of the whole exercise. And that is the point of the scene.
Tom Vaughan
It's the relationships that matter in your screenwriting.
“What audiences really care about,” he said, “Was seeing the character share that achievement with a loved one.”
Keep a scene dynamic through character tactics.
The key to keeping a scene fresh and alive is characters making choices in reaction to what happens around them.
Five lessons that saved my screenwriting career.
After my career collapsed in 2005 and my slow return to it around 2008 or so, I realized there were dozens of things I didn’t want to repeat.
Do we really need to raise the stakes?
Raising the stakes often misses the point.
What we really want is for the audience to care more deeply about the story’s outcome.
The questions you ask matter.
"How do I format slow motion in my screenplay?"
It sounds simple, right? But it's the wrong question.
Don't sleep on writing short films.
Writing shorts is a near-perfect laboratory for improving your screenwriting. Nearly everything you learn about feature writing applies to shorts.
Key decisions that make your screenwriting easier.
Here is a harsh truth: 99% of your passes are pre-destined. Here's why.
Scene generation: "What do we want to see?"
Given the characters, genre, situation, relationships, and the concepts we have established:
What do we want to see?
What motivates the characters in your screenplay?
Anxiety means well. Anxiety’s job is to protect us, after all. It’s just usually an incredibly unskilled and unproductive way to do it.
How to attack your scene transitions.
Nearly every screenplay has 100+ transitions from one scene to another. This can be a major area of stress with the reader. Don't let it be.
Strategies for the industry contraction.
I was back in Los Angeles for the first time in eight months. My first priority was to sit and talk with my agents.
This is what we discussed.