THURSDAY'S SCRIPT TIP:

SELECTED VIEWING

On the TV show SURVIVOR three days in the lives of the survivors are shown in a one hour episode. That's 72 hours shown in about 45 minutes (once you take out the titles and commercials). That means there's a lot that we DON'T see. Plus there are different angles and different points of view.

Last night Season #37 (!!!) of SURVIVOR premiered with a 90 minute episode - DAVID Vs. GOLIATH - among the 20 new castaways are filmmaker Mike White, professional wrestler John Hennigan, and model Daniel Rengering... who will fight to survive on Fiji

Way back on Season 2 - AUSTRAILIAN OUTBACK, self centered chef Keith decided to take a hike alone to the top of a ridge. One camera crew followed his trek, while other camera crews followed Colby and Tina and Elizabeth. There's a camera crew for each survivor - sometimes that means we'll get three angles of a conversation between three survivors, sometimes that means we'll see one survivor off doing their own thing. Each week a group of editors go through hundreds of hours of video tape and turn it into that 45 minute story. There may be hours and hours of Keith sunbathing... we don't need to see that. There may be a one hour conversation between Tina and Colby with one minute devoted to Keith acting aloof. The editor cuts that minute of Tina-Colby conversation to a shot of Keith sunbathing alone on top of the mountain and you have part of a story.

But while we're following Elizabeth, we have no idea what the others are doing... they're off camera. The editor gets to pick what we see, what scenes are important, who we're following at any time. They compress those hundreds of hours into 45 minutes that tells a single story every week. Because they knew the story would end with Elizabeth being voted off, they chose scenes that made Elizabeth look like part of the team and Keith look like an outsider - that created a reversal. They know how it ends, so they can pick scenes that create a beginning and a middle and follow the story threads that will pay off with the end vote.

They create the story from the raw footage. That story will need a strong through-line: the story is heading towards that end where someone is booted off the island from the very beginning. The editor is choosing which scenes create the most impact when that ending is revealed. As I say in the OUTLINES & THEMATIC Blue Book, a "through-line" is the spine of your story and every single scene is attached to that spine. Though a reality show like SURVIVOR has multiple protagonists, so some of this episode is setting up character conflicts in later episodes, in a feature screenplay we have *one* protagonist and their struggle with the conflict is the spine of the story and every single scene is connected to that conflict. Most scenes in a feature screenplay will feature either the protagonist or antagonist. If the protagonist gets their hair cut, that probably won't even make it into the screenplay... but if it is critical to the story and critical to the spine of the story, we put that scene in. But there is little chance that the protagonist's barber would ever get their own scene. That has nothing to do with the story we are telling... unless the antagonist is in the scene. We decide what scenes go in and what scenes we leave out.

We are editors for the story in our script. We can't show every hour of every character's life, so we have to pick the scenes that tell our story. We have to select what the audience will see. When your protagonist is on screen, we aren't seeing what all of those other characters are doing... but they ARE doing something. Just because a character is off screen for 20 pages of your story doesn't mean they are in suspended animation! We just aren't using the footage from that character's camera crew.

But what if we did? What if we decided to turn one of your supporting characters into the protagonist and focus on THEIR story for two hours? Would that story make sense? Would their character be on a journey - chasing a goal and coming up against conflict? Could you edit together an episode about their lives? A frequent reason why stories seem implausible is because supporting characters only exist to prompt the protagonist - they are props rather than realistic characters. If the elements surrounding the protagonist seem unreal, the protagonist and story become unreal, too. The characters become fabrications and we want them to be flesh and blood. You should always be able to use the footage from the other camera crews following your characters around. Even though we won't see that footage, it must exist somewhere in your mind.

When we write a screenplay we are creating a reality, then acting as editors to show the portions of that reality which tell our story. That doesn't make the portions of the story we DON'T see unimportant. Without those other characters we don't have a story - they create the conflict and the complications and the emotional relationships for your protagonist.

While your protagonist is on camera, what is your antagonist doing? What is your romantic interest doing? What is the sidekick doing? Do these characters have real lives, or are they only props in your protagonist's story?

Watch what they decide to show us in the 45 minutes they air on a reality show... that will tell the story. Whether it's THE APPRENTICE or SURVIVOR or THE GREAT RACE or GREATEST LOSER, they take hundreds of hours of video and edit them into a story. They decide what to show us, what not to show us, and how to combine scenes to turn random incidents into a coheasive story. A good script is just as much about what we don't see as what we do see.

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ARE YOUR SCENES IN THE RIGHT ORDER?
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