John August

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The labs, day four

Sundance

hikeTwo meetings, a good hike and a chocolate shake made for a good day at the Sundance lab, my last full day before flying home tomorrow afternoon.

[John Gatins](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0309691/) made a good point today about his work and his job. “His work” is writing, and “his job” is all the attendant meetings and drama it takes to get his work on the screen. It’s a helpful distinction, one I often make between the craft of screenwriting (the words on the page) and the profession of screenwriting (making a living at it).

As part of a partnership with YouTube, a crew has been shooting interviews and behind-the-scenes stuff with the filmmakers. I’ll be putting up those links as they come.

Writing better scene openings

How-To, Scriptcast

Today’s [scriptcast](http://johnaugust.com/archives/category/scriptcast) focuses on how you start scenes.

The standard advice is always to come into a scene as late as possible, and exit as soon as you can. That’s a lot of what I’m doing in this tutorial. By picking the right opening action (or opening line), you can jump past a lot of boilerplate and get to the meat of the scene. Along the way, you can provide more texture and detail to keep it from feeling so generic.

To save your eyes from the tiny type, you may want to go full-screen. That’s the second button from the right on the bottom of the video.

Writing better action

How-To, Scriptcast, Video

A new screencast (scriptcast?), a little shorter than the [previous one](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/scene-description).

In the audio, I say “parallel action,” but a better term would be parallel structure: You’re lining up sentences to omit the subject. Action sequences tend to benefit from these staccato word bursts.