Day 3 – What I learned …

[Isti Madarasz]

What’s good about this conversation is that it raises suspicions very well. First the officer explains how they usually secure someone and yet here we are talking about the President of the USA. He explains what the minimum he would have done if he was supposed to be overseeing security – but he was sidelined. He explains what the basic steps are in such a case – and here none of them were taken. It’s as if they were deliberately not trying to protect the president… What makes the scene so powerful is that the Officer never once makes a specific accusation, just keeps listing suspicious elements and letting the listener’s mind build up a mental picture. At the end, he asks questions -again, not answering them for the other person, but cleverly putting the answers together in his mind. He doesn’t even have to say who he suspects at the end – he lets the other person do it.

What I have learned from this is that it is much more powerful to raise questions in the other person, to provoke suspicion rather than answer it. The end result will be the same, but it will be more enjoyable.

[Deb Johnson]

I wrote a scene from scratch that reveals the backstory of a curse (for my horror screenplay). It needs development, but I realized that a talking head isn’t so bad if they are revealing intriguing information. I also, like in JFK, inserted “vintage footage” to support what my credible narrator is explaining to gain the audience’s trust. The interviewer is a skeptic, but he is attentively listening and corroborating her story. All these elements support the stacking intrigue I’m building in this scene.

[Mary Dietz]

I chose to work on a scene where the family must move away if they are to survive the famine. There is a battle between intention and resistance.

I’m using questions to reveal the details of what is being threatened at present; that also lets me express what other consequences can be experienced if the family stays. This also allows me to explore some of the dangers that may be encountered in the journey and immigration into the other country. The man is intentional, and the woman is resistant. This lets me explore this conversation with gender issues as well as survival issues.

Hopefully, this conversation will keep the viewer in suspense and wanting to know what actually happens, and it can also foreshadow some of what does happen. It definitely helps to outline the stakes of their final decision.