Good morning, fellow artists! Welcome to another exciting edition of my weekly Hollywood blog. I’ve officially begun applying my Slamdance coverage notes to the second half of Act Two for my latest feature film script, and I wanted to share a couple of those insights with you today:
Act Two B: It’s good, and now we add the element of ************ [spoilers redacted!] This exacerbates a lot of things, but the conflicts, stakes, consequences, threats, and end-of-act low point could all be bigger.
We want realistic, high-stakes and huge conflicts—especially going into the end of the act, where all should seem lost. Make everything crash and burn. Feature films make audiences unable to predict how this could ever be resolved, and then you resolve it (usually with things you’ve set up or planted beforehand). Really show how hard this is.
Armed with these directives, I created a bulleted list of every challenge my protagonist faces during this phase of Act Two—which Jeffrey Alan Schechter calls the “Warrior Phase” in My Story Can Beat Up Your Story. At this point in the script, every obstacle should prove tougher than the last as the protagonist fights through, getting bloodied and beaten (literally or figuratively), to achieve their compelling goal.
Laying out the challenges allowed me to see the progression of these obstacles and where I needed to raise the stakes to make everything truly “crash and burn.”
I’m thrilled to be tackling this section of the script, and I’m proud of the progress I’ve made so far. These coverage notes have provided a clear, sharp path as I push through this second draft.
See you next week!
