Hello, my fellow artists! I am recapping my weekly experiences of the writing course I’m taking at the Sundance Collab. These recaps are a cool insight into the creative process and personal journey of building something from scratch. In this case, a feature film treatment.
Recap: Week 5. Let’s jump right in! I haven’t experienced impostor syndrome yet, so that’s good! We’ve studied films like “You Can Count On Me” and “Sideways” in the last couple of weeks. I have also been thinking a lot about my story while in the shower, while on the toilet, and while trying to go to sleep. Keep reading below 🙂
This week, we focused on the three act structure and creating a beat sheet. Once again, I was glad I understood the three act structure and its components due to my previous work with “My Story Can Beat Up Your Story”. Last week, I submitted my action summary to my advisor for feedback. Now, it was time to take that action summary and extract sections that fulfilled the major components of the three act structure. So far, so good: My action summary contained the components of the three act structure, and I plugged them in (e.g. the inciting incident, the midpoint of act two, the act two climax, etc.) Keep reading below 🙂
Once I did that, it was now time to tackle the beat sheet. And you might be asking yourself: What’s the difference between the three act structure and the beat sheet? The way I look at it is that the three act structure is like the major overview of your story. Kind of like the skeleton of your story. This structure contains these major moments you need to have and hit in your story, whereas the beat sheet is the beginning of the scene by scene breakdown of your story. This is where you start filling in scenes across the three acts. Keep reading below 🙂
So, I went from this major overview of my story to the scene by scene breakdown of it. And like my instructor said, “the beat sheet isn’t pretty. It’s an outline of an outline. But each short scene description should march you through the basic building blocks of those three acts.” The beat sheet can be rough and crude. All I need to do right now is write one-liner scenes that take my story from beginning to end. For example, I wrote, “Luke runs down the streets of Brooklyn with a bag of chips in his hands.” “Luke goes home and interacts with his mother and brother.” “Luke flies to LA to start training.” “They kiss.” That’s it LOL. There were some scenes where I added more details, but I loved and enjoyed the freedom of these one-liners. It took the pressure off of feeling like 1) I needed to know every single scene that occurs in my movie (which I don’t!) and 2) that I had to describe every single scene in detail (which I can’t…yet!) I know more scenes will come to me as I keep looking at my story, and I’m pretty sure we will get to the details in a future class LOL. Keep reading below 🙂
My story is growing and taking shape! Until next week!
Chasing The George 