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leitskev
Posted: April 9th, 2017, 11:10am Report to Moderator
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This is something few books seem to focus on, and yet it's in some ways the most important part of making screenplays. This post is a request for insight!

It's very hard to do. Maybe there is no real guide, you just have to have the talent for it.

We all know how to set up a scene that has the ingredients for tension. But few amateurs seem to be much good at really building and drawing out that tension. I know I am struggling with it, thus this post.

A classic example I look to is the opening in Inglorious Bastards. QT sets the stakes by showing the innocent farmer with his beautiful wife and daughters. No songs, of course, that would undermine the scene by creating the distracting possibility of a son getting involved.

The Nazis arrive looking for a Jewish family. So right away, the scene is loaded with tension based on the stakes: the farmer's family.

While he has our attention, QT teases, disarming us with the polite Nazi colonel. But he has out attention, we know something is up.

And at the right time, the danger is amplified with a shot showing the family hiding under the floor(dramatic irony).

So we have stake setting.
Amplification.
Dramatic irony.

The tension really builds when the colonel lets on that he knows the farmer is not telling all he knows. So an increasing threat.

The key to the scene is suspense. Suspense is a delay before the events proceed to release the tension. In this film, the delay is milked for like 20 minutes, with the gradual amplification used to hold our attention.

But still, it's really hard to pull these scenes off.

Are there any other techniques people can suggest?
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eldave1
Posted: April 9th, 2017, 1:15pm Report to Moderator
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The IB opening is one of my favorite movie scenes of all time. I think you dissected spot on.  My thoughts on what you wrote:


Quoted Text
A classic example I look to is the opening in Inglorious Bastards. QT sets the stakes by showing the innocent farmer with his beautiful wife and daughters.


JUXTAPOSITION:

i.e.,  two things being seen or placed close together with contrasting effect.

We know right away of the innocence of the farm family as contrasted against the evil of the Nazis. Boom - right out of the box he has them in the same - the juxtaposition creates tension.

This works with characters as well as places (e.g., think a priest in a strip club) or goals (e.g., defense attorney vs prosecutor.


Quoted Text
While he has our attention, QT teases, disarming us with the polite Nazi colonel. But he has out attention, we know something is up.


SUBMERGING THE EVIL

We already know the evil goal, But the politeness and sophistication of the General, the seemingly inconsequential conversation about the quality of milk all serve to build the tension and escalate the impact. We ask ourselves how can this m-fer being this calm and blase when we know he is evil. A clever way to milk (pun intended) the scene. For me, something is far more riveting when it goes 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10! then when it goes from 1 - 10! in an instant.


Quoted Text
And at the right time, the danger is amplified with a shot showing the family hiding under the floor(dramatic irony).


FORESHADOWING THE EVENT

You are dead bang right here - at this exact moment, we are brought in. We can feel the fear under the floorboards and now are staying until there is a conclusion. What QT does so brilliantly here is not make it  really matter whether the Jewish Family is shot or not. There is so much tension built by the foreshadowing of what could happen, we will either gasp in relief if they are not killed or reel in horror if they are.  

I find that some many scripts want so badly to have the unexpected twist - they blow the tension angle by not foreshadowing what are the likely outcomes.  


Quoted Text
The tension really builds when the colonel lets on that he knows the farmer is not telling all he knows. So an increasing threat.


I would also add that it builds as the villains goal becomes clearer. For me, in this scene, it was when the General went into his soliloquy using a metaphor comparing Jews to rats. He is telling us right there that in his mind they are merely rodents and he is merely an exterminator. Sent chills up my spine.


Quoted Text
The key to the scene is suspense. Suspense is a delay before the events proceed to release the tension. In this film, the delay is milked for like 20 minutes, with the gradual amplification used to hold our attention.


Nice to have someone else appreciate this scene. I thought it was friggin brilliant writing.


My Scripts can all be seen here:

http://dlambertson.wix.com/scripts
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Steven
Posted: April 10th, 2017, 8:33am Report to Moderator
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Lessons From The Screenplay is a YouTube channel and they used the intro to IG as a lesson in tension.
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leitskev
Posted: April 10th, 2017, 10:14am Report to Moderator
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It's really hard doing these scenes. The Bastards scene offers another clue too, in what it doesn't do. Back to that in a second.

I can usually set up the scene. That's the first step. There needs to be conflict, there needs to be a character that we care what happens to. Usually one character wants something and another stands in his way. It's easy to schedule these kind of scenes in one's outline.

It's more tricky when you get to the actual writing of them. That's where milking it comes in...drawing out the tension, letting it build.

But another problem is making the scene credible. The audience has to buy into it. And you have to avoid cliche dialog and, well, cheese. It's hard.

The Bastards scene again is a great example. In almost every other writer's hand, the colonel would come in as a standard grotesque Nazi. Probably a man of few words and menacing looks barking sharp orders. The kind of thing we always see.

QT made the scene memorable by changing the formula. His colonel is charming, enthusiastic, polite.

I'm writing a scene this morning, I won't bore with the details, but it's difficult to avoid the cliche while maintaining the threat level.

QT probably rewrote that scene many, many times. His colonel is polite and civilized and even friendly...yet he LOVES his job! He loves hunting Jews. He loves toying with those he interrogates. QT sets up his antagonist to be different, and that allows him to actually get into the character's head and make him dimensional, to make him drive the scene. He might have made the colonel polite, warm, friendly...and reluctantly doing his job. He didn't. He made him love his job, proud of his nickname the Jew Hunter, or whatever it was. And this allows him the big thing needed to build tension: TIME.

To create the time needed for tension to build, a scene needs to hold our attention. He does this by having a compelling character, compelling because he is unique and not cliche.
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eldave1
Posted: April 10th, 2017, 10:25am Report to Moderator
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Cool link - thanks


My Scripts can all be seen here:

http://dlambertson.wix.com/scripts
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eldave1
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Quoted from leitskev
It's really hard doing these scenes. The Bastards scene offers another clue too, in what it doesn't do. Back to that in a second.

I can usually set up the scene. That's the first step. There needs to be conflict, there needs to be a character that we care what happens to. Usually one character wants something and another stands in his way. It's easy to schedule these kind of scenes in one's outline.

It's more tricky when you get to the actual writing of them. That's where milking it comes in...drawing out the tension, letting it build.

But another problem is making the scene credible. The audience has to buy into it. And you have to avoid cliche dialog and, well, cheese. It's hard.

The Bastards scene again is a great example. In almost every other writer's hand, the colonel would come in as a standard grotesque Nazi. Probably a man of few words and menacing looks barking sharp orders. The kind of thing we always see.

QT made the scene memorable by changing the formula. His colonel is charming, enthusiastic, polite.

I'm writing a scene this morning, I won't bore with the details, but it's difficult to avoid the cliche while maintaining the threat level.

QT probably rewrote that scene many, many times. His colonel is polite and civilized and even friendly...yet he LOVES his job! He loves hunting Jews. He loves toying with those he interrogates. QT sets up his antagonist to be different, and that allows him to actually get into the character's head and make him dimensional, to make him drive the scene. He might have made the colonel polite, warm, friendly...and reluctantly doing his job. He didn't. He made him love his job, proud of his nickname the Jew Hunter, or whatever it was. And this allows him the big thing needed to build tension: TIME.

To create the time needed for tension to build, a scene needs to hold our attention. He does this by having a compelling character, compelling because he is unique and not cliche.


Yes - not unlike Hannibal in Silence of the Lambs - he is an intellectual.

Stereotypical characters, regardless of genre, are the most boring and the least tension inducing because are own prejudgments wire us to  tell us in advance what they are going to do.  


My Scripts can all be seen here:

http://dlambertson.wix.com/scripts
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leitskev
Posted: April 10th, 2017, 11:19am Report to Moderator
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Yup. Though I do have a hesitation. Remember I was talking about the film Genius? The critical review I read, from Rolling Stone, complained about the main character's wife being cliche. I thought it was a silly complaint. The wife is not an important character, she's briefly in a few scenes. Her role is not to create conflict in any of them. I didn't find her cliche anyway. It's the early 30s, she's a housewife raising their daughters almost by herself. But she has dreams of being a playwright and she is pursuing them! She's involved with theater. It was just the right level of making her different and at the same time credible...and still perform her function in the story, which is to highlight certain weaknesses of the main character.

I think the word cliche, or familiar, gets thrown around waaaaay too often. Drives me crazy actually.

But that said, for scene antagonists it certainly helps to have an original character holding our attention.
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eldave1
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Quoted from leitskev
Yup. Though I do have a hesitation. Remember I was talking about the film Genius? The critical review I read, from Rolling Stone, complained about the main character's wife being cliche. I thought it was a silly complaint. The wife is not an important character, she's briefly in a few scenes. Her role is not to create conflict in any of them. I didn't find her cliche anyway. It's the early 30s, she's a housewife raising their daughters almost by herself. But she has dreams of being a playwright and she is pursuing them! She's involved with theater. It was just the right level of making her different and at the same time credible...and still perform her function in the story, which is to highlight certain weaknesses of the main character.

I think the word cliche, or familiar, gets thrown around waaaaay too often. Drives me crazy actually.

But that said, for scene antagonists it certainly helps to have an original character holding our attention.


Some characters should be "cliche". One would go insane reading something where everyone is against form. I was mainly referring to protagonists and antagonists.  


My Scripts can all be seen here:

http://dlambertson.wix.com/scripts
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leitskev
Posted: April 10th, 2017, 12:30pm Report to Moderator
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Yup. I knew you were. You're right, I think. And archetypes are archetypes for a reason, no sense to throw them out.
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PrussianMosby
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When I come with what I believe is my A-game in feature writing, there's one question that is the most important regarding each story beat and scene in the outlines:

What does the audience think and feel at this specific moment? And then and then…

No theories, no detours.

This question is where I believe you reach control over genre (tension or not) and dramatic balance.

To me it's much more important to have contact with the reader/viewer than any story theory could artificially offer. Here, we all know Aristotle, 8 sequences, 3 act structure, save the cat beats and other story theories. It's even in our blood since we heard stories as we were kids at the camp fire.

Especially, when you truly start with the ending of the story, as most experts say, and then imagine what the people think and feel while walking back to the parking lot – at this place you will perceive if the story is worth telling anyway and more than that you will find the most authentic way how to reach that point and how to fill in those 90 pages.

Not meant to diminish the qualified knowledge of you guys, just saying your instincts and heart is where the trophy sits.

Probably I just wanted to make a post


@ possibly my post is too vague so I try to bring it into context with Kevin's Tarantino example.

I think QT does modern entertainment with few old school pop art characteristics. That's the only thing I feel after having seen his flicks. After Django I don't think much about slavery – after seeing 20 years a slave, I do. That's how they draw out their concept in every scene: What does the viewer feel???

(^^at least in climatic stories)

QT is clear about that impact and tries to transport that feeling in each and every scene to the max.

Here in Europe I feel we get much more anti-climatic stories than in the USA since we haven't that strong industry so that filmmakers take different chances. I heard Herzog did Aguirre while writing the script in the jungle at set.  All about instincts and direct impression. In a sense the approach is the approach there; no system at all.




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leitskev
Posted: April 10th, 2017, 2:55pm Report to Moderator
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"Probably I just wanted to make a post "

That's why I love this guy!

Hey, Prussia(Alex, right?), good to hear from you.

Let me refine what I'm asking for help with here: what are some techniques to help properly milk the tension out of any scene, whether comedy, horror, drama. Tension is the most important thing in crafting a particular scene. My guess is that's true in Europe too, tell me if I'm wrong.

I'm not so much asking about larger structure.

Let's make up a scene for our quirky French romance and see if we can come up with stuff.

Ok, so Pierre has been secretly in love with the girl in the apartment next door. But he needs an excuse to talk to her!

Finally he has just the thing: there's a charity bake sale in the building. She is a volunteer. So he plans to show up and buy pastry, make small talk, hopefully score some good flirts!

One problem: he's stuck at work.

So in our next scene, he has to convince his boss to let him half the afternoon off. But his boss already kind of hates him. So that's our scene.

So now we have to write the scene. The conflict seems obvious. He wants the day off, the boss doesn't want to give it to him. Looks promising in our structure that we designed weeks ago. But now we're at the writing of the scene...what to do, what to do?

We don't want to make the boss a cliche.
Yet the tension and conflict must be sharp, sharp, sharp.
We have to milk the scene but taking the time to build it, draw it out, fuel the tension.
How do we construct the scene?

One thing I usually do with my scenes is build them around a turning point, or sometimes a double turning point where the second TP reverses the first.

I've been doing my scenes that way for years...and it's still freaking hard to build tension! It's also hard to know, as the WRITER, if the scene has tension, because it's hard to feel it when we the writer know where it's going.

We can try to look for larger structural and thematic elements for clues. Maybe there is something we want the character to learn in this scene.

Maybe in this scene the boss can represent a different facet of the antagonistic force. But now I'm in over my head with talk like that!

So how do we make that scene with the boss feel really filled with tension(could be humorous tension, that counts)?
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PrussianMosby
Posted: April 10th, 2017, 3:45pm Report to Moderator
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Kevin, yes I'm Alex still and for a while now.

"So in our next scene, he has to convince his boss to let him half the afternoon off. But his boss already kind of hates him. So that's our scene."

Should it be funny or dramatic, confusing? Again, what does the audience feel about the whole flick? Do you know the value for the audience? There you find the way.

Does he struggle to her all along – then let him struggle, hard.

If it's a story about how coincidence belongs to love – confuse, be natural, make the conflict usual, normal, About-Schmidt-like, low conflict; FITTING conflict, simply authentic. Mirror the story core. Don't go for individual scenarios if it's not true to your final message and the people's experience.

I haven't read McKee but he makes an impressive statement: Every line must aim at the core of the story. Every line.

"and it's still freaking hard to build tension"

You don't have to do it. You could write scripts that are exposition heavy and have higher climaxes. See: Moneyball. We see the coach grow, he learns. Slowly, and it's interesting. Empathic. Sure there might be conflict in scenes. Ask yourself: What do you remember in case of the film? Tension, conflict???? No. The movie is about, imo, that new things need courage and stamina. And that's what coach shows in most scenes. The scenes mirror the core.

"So how do we make that scene with the boss feel really filled with tension(could be humorous tension, that counts)?"

Indeed when the boss and guy have their talk you're within the heroes' journey. Where is guy? Ready to fight his boss to fight for the girl? Still unstable toward his goal?

I can follow your thoughts but I can't help you in those individual scenes/beats. As McKee said, I think the message defines. We shouldn't construct, rather feel, and share.




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PrussianMosby
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Hey Kev, I read your words in the birthday thread and it feels good to receive such sympathy.

In your thread here, I "tried" to make clear, for you, that people here who are serious, including you, are good screenwriters. All fine in that area. I just did that in an indirect way.

I know from you that you keep calling yourself into question and aim to get better. You are good. Good enough. Very good. Or ready. Whatever, 100% qualified to handle a script and guide it with producers. What I "tried to say" is that we know those "valuable" techniques, that f.i. Dave called out, to raise tension. You know them.

I understand that you keep your feature scripts away from public. I'm sure about it for years now since you were one of the first persons I interchanged with here and you always helped me to get contact on the board, so I kept an eye on your actions. And I ignore the specific scenes-thing to raise tension. To me: it's a theoretic monster discussion and in the end I KNOW you write good scripts and handle things right. It sounds stupid but as I wanted to explain to you, your scripts, have reasons - and that's connected to balance everything. And your reasons to write them, I know, are good reasons. Reasons, message, impact. That's feeling to me. And in a sense that should dictate tension and conflict. Authenticity. Otherwise you would do it for the money – then let's be serious: we would choose another job (learn some law or shit), wouldn't we?

You are ready. It feels as if the rejection bounces you back here from time to time. I myself get love for my script from successful filmmakers, and I mean Oscar winners and such. Never, has it been enough. Great, but "sorry not me", it was.

So this was a drama my friend, right? I hope there's some heart and tension :-) just continue and if we go under, then that was our passion in our life.




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leitskev
Posted: April 12th, 2017, 5:40pm Report to Moderator
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Hey Alex

Not rejections driving me back, I don't really shot any scripts. I have a project or two with Pia that's been shopped, and another one with Dena. The main reason for my absence is Jeff knocked me off the barstool at Simplyscripts Bar and Grille!

No, I left because I was turning to prose and novels. That's still my focus, though I dabble with scripts, leaving my stinky mark on Pia and Dena's projects!

I have yet to write a screenplay I consider commercially viable, so I don't shop them. I think I have a better chance breaking through with prose, even into the movie world. My prose has gotten to be pretty decent.

But I do still want to master milking tension out of scenes. Any advice is eagerly lapped up by me.

A key strategy seems to be this: how to effectively create the delay.

The delay is the suspension. That's often the tricky part.

Alex walks into a bank and pulls a gun, demanding money from the teller.

The teller says no, over my dead body.

That creates some tension, right? Well now we have to let it build, let it grow. So we have to delay events. Maybe the scene is supposed to end with Alex running out without the money. But we need to delay that conclusion. That's how we build tension.

So maybe Alex says to the teller,
hey, don't I know you.
Yeah, we went to junior high together.
Oh yeah, you were the teacher's pet.
And you used to pick on me.
I was just a kid, but give me the money or we'll be right back in school.
That's why you'll have to shoot me. I'm not gonna take it anymore.
It's not your money, fill the bag for god's sake.
I'm going to press the alarm.
I'm warning you! (he raises the gun)
You remember Grace?
Of course.
You stole her from me. I'm not gonna let you rob this bank.
(he puts his hand over the button and waits)
You little...
Go ahead, shoot me. That's the only way I won't hit the alarm. One, two...
I'm warning you!
Three.
(presses the alarm)
(Alex runs from store)

I know, that's lame. But the point is to try to build through delay. It's hard.
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PrussianMosby
Posted: April 12th, 2017, 6:09pm Report to Moderator
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"The main reason for my absence is Jeff knocked me off the barstool at Simplyscripts Bar and Grille!"

Haha. But he's also qualified. Let's be serious. As I read, he wrote a script with Shawn Davis about Chernobil f.i.. They know what they're doing. And they feel the stuff and know why they wrote it (I hate it to talk about third persons like that btw)

"Not rejections driving me back"

I stated this comment as a placeholder, because it's noticeable that you are hungry (< we'd say it like that in Germany). Do it, Kevin. Sell that book, whatever. Self-publishing etc… There is no other way than being brave, pitch, call, email, talk,,, and eat shit without much/any despair.

… your dialoge…

"I know, that's lame."

It isn't. It's a good scenario. Of course, it even could be milked out more. The question is: What for?

What is the flick?  Does it fit? .... You cannot, imo, invent 3 minutes and let them work or function independently from what you're doing as a whole.

I repeat myself: You are ready and qualified. It's not only my opinion, Kevin. It's the truth. And that's not a smarm move, or whatever you'd say in English.

IMO you hide yourself behind those systems. You're good enough. I read your discussions with Dream for three years now, and he's an expert, but more pragmatic than you, what is good and respectable too (again: I hate it to talk about third persons), -- and you withstand (<not sure if it's the right word) with your emotional side. Movies are about feelings: I never thought you have a bad position in whatever kind of discussion, rather a massively strong one.




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