Character-Driven Scenes

About this course:

David Mamet said, “If you’re bored by a scene, so is your audience.” Every scene in a script serves a purpose. When they are character-driven, they keep us emotionally invested and engaged with the story. Individual scenes have a lot of moving pieces, from how they are structured to what they reveal about the external and internal conflicts of the characters. In this course, we look at the essence of scenes from where they start and end to their three act structure. We examine scenes in movies and TV shows to identify their purpose, what the arc of a scene reveals about character and how it advances the story. Students learn the essential components of a scene and the questions that each scene needs to ask and answer in order to tell compelling stories. By the end of the course, you have 2-3 rewritten or original scenes for your current project and a map to link those scenes into a sequence.