Iconic Scenes

"If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it." —Elmore Leonard

This week we looked at what makes an iconic scene.. We watched the opening sequence of The Social Network. Sound design and directorial choices set up the themes of the film with a cacophony of voices almost drowning out the stream of machine-gun fast dialogue. It's an electric scene that is immediately subverted by the next sequence - this is a film not about relationships but about hubris and revenge... just like Facebook.

We workshopped our scenes paying particular attention to the tempo and tone, and whether these can be heightened. We were challenged to push our scenes to extremes without overstepping the laws we've set up for the world of our films. Humour can be used to lend authorial licence to take the scene to a more heightened place. Inanimate objects, weather and secondary characters can be used to reflect what's happening in the scene. And a change of character point of view can create more of a sense of the unexpected. So I set my key scene in a hurricane from the PoV of a frog and I think it's really helped.