The Screenplay: Scene and Sequence

The two basic building blocks

If we say a sequence is about as long as a camera roll of film and not any longer than 10–11 minutes, and that a feature film will have anywhere from 7–12 sequences (depending on whether the feature is a programmer or an epic), then we get about 10 pages of script to cover an entire sequence.

Not a lot of space or time.

From this we can see that shorter scenes will let us cover more scenes within a given sequence. Scenes that average a single page in length will give us 10 scenes in a sequence.

Now it’s an odd thing: the more steps we take to get from point A to point B, the greater the distance seems to be. The length of our steps seems to matter less.

Thus, 10 short scenes will make their sequence seem longer to us in the audience than 5 longer scenes.

But a scene that only lasts a page gives us no room to develop anything at all.

The goal, then, is to be as economical as possible about the scene.

The later into the scene you can begin, the better.

The earlier you can get out of a scene, the better.

We also want to ‘pre-write’ scenes in the sense of preparing for a later scene in an earlier one. ‘Where do we go now?’ raises the reply, ‘To Marrakech.’ And from that line we can open already in Marrakech and we needn’t show any of the passage there.

Scenes that are extremely brief, and take up less than a page, let us average one page per scene, and also include one or two scenes that are more developed, and last 2 or even 3 pages.

Each sequence is somewhat of a tale unto itself, with its own set of acts. But scenes can be as fragmentary as you like.

One consideration the talesman must make, who intends his screenplay to be made into a movie, is how many locations must be filmed in. This is not a consideration for the talesman who writes his screenplay only as preparation to a prose tale and a way of organizing his matter before his first real draft. But for those who wish to see their screenplay produced, cost must be considered in advance.

(Composed on keyboard Saturday, June 7, 2008)