Let’s do reverse cause and effect for the video-watching scene.

Object: The umpire finally gets it and wants to apologize.

Final Effect: The umpire cries, feeling awful for the kids, and says he used to love baseball more than anything when he was young.

Immediate Cause: The dad runs video of the kids crying after the game. It was their last chance to win the big one for their coach, who is retiring, and they had it in their hands—they had it! They don’t even hate the ump—they’re just stunned and heartbroken.

Cause: The umpire feels horrible, seeing that he’s an appallingly bad umpire and was really hurtful to the kids. He says he had gotten so sick of kids because of his job as a crossing guard, but he sees now that they’re all wonderful.

Cause: The dad shows a view of the umpire’s bad call from another angle and zooms in, revealing that the umpire was actually checking his cell phone at the critical moment.

Cause: The umpire becomes furious, saying he just glanced at his watch, and it was nothing.

Cause: One camera shows the umpire looking at something for a moment at the crucial point when the contested play happens.

Cause: The dad has done an obsessively meticulous editing job, complete with slo-mo replays, close-ups, voiceover and captions. He says he has a fantastic editing program and lots of time at night because he can’t sleep. He says he can get a little manic. “A little?” snaps the ump.

Cause: The dad has filmed the game with multiple cameras, some that he set up on tripods. Plus he got tape from other parents who shot the game, and he makes the umpire watch it over and over again. In spite of his rage, the umpire is amazed at all the footage.

Cause: The dad tells the umpire that he has to watch the video of the game he ruined. He says if the umpire makes any trouble, he’ll tell his wife he saw him cheating on her when he was stalking the umpire to figure out how to pull this off.

Cause: The dad has the umpire tied to a chair in front of a big plasma TV. The umpire is raging mad, shrieking that he hates baseball and that he’s going to have him sent to jail for this. Or shot. Or both.

If you read this from the bottom up, you’ll be able to see the scene as though you were watching a movie, enabling you to write a scene based on this detailed outline. Work from the general to the particular, keeping it simple at first, and then getting more specific on each pass as you go from the overall script to the act to the sequence and then to the scene. The trick is to develop just a little more detail on each successive pass, gradually fleshing out the particulars as they become necessary. Notice how tight the cause and effect is in this scene.

Getting caught up in too much detail prematurely can be counterproductive and gum up your creative process. It helps to remain free of unnecessary detail because then you can “travel light” and stay flexible. It’s much easier to make adjustments, whether minor or major, if you’re not encumbered with too many details and “fantastic” scenes you wrote before you got the macro structure of the story worked out properly. It’s a great luxury to be able to scrap your third act by merely throwing out a page or two of outlining, rather than chucking away months worth of scenes that simply do not work no matter how much you tweak them. Remember that you’re just scouting ahead and laying trail markers, not carrying the whole wagon train on your back. You’ll have a much better time of it when you’re trying to make the big picture work.

To use this tool: Take the story you’ve created (it’s hard to use this process until you’ve roughed out a plot), lay out what you’ve got on cards and create a tight chain of events by working backwards. Now you’ve got the spine of your plot—with a good forward flow. Next, divide it into acts and work through reverse cause and effect for the first act. Ask “What’s the object of the act?” and “What’s the final effect that demonstrates that object on-screen with real actors?” Then ask “What’s the immediate cause of that effect?” and so on as you build backwards to the beginning of the act. Weave in just a little more detail—but only as much as is necessary to flesh out the mechanics. Do this for the rest of the acts, then divide each act into sequences, and work through reverse cause and effect for each of these. This is a lot of work, but so is 25 rewrites, and having a well thought-out outline will give you a much more solid working draft. You can take all the energy that goes into rewrites and put it into engineering the script properly before you write it.

Finally, take each sequence and divide it into scenes, work through reverse cause and effect for the first scene and then write the scene. Work your way through them all and you’ll end up with a completed script in which each scene is tight and part of a tight sequence, which is in turn part of a tight act and overall story. Your script moves continually from cause directly to effect and helps keep the audience’s expectations rolling along. MM

 

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