Readers and movie-goers like big stories. That doesn’t mean only stories in which the world is going to be destroyed by aliens or international terrorist rings try to bring down the Western world.
It can be a story about the effect of a divorce on a child but even when the event is small we want to see the big impact. In one case it’s the impact on the planet, in the other it’s the impact on a child.
If you tend to make your stories too small, or in the case
of screenplays not visual enough, you can use the BLOW-UP METHOD (blow-up as in inflate, not explode).
It means pushing a particular incident as far as you can, far beyond what is sensible. By expanding the boundaries that far, you can then cut back and still end up with a choice that has more impact than the one you started with.
I’ll give you an example. In a script I’m working on, I have a father who owns a company, and his grown son, his second-in-command. The son expects the father to retire and then the son will finally run the company. In the first draft I have a scene in their boardroom where the father announces he’s changed his mind. He’s not going to retire any time soon.
This is a feature film, and the scene seemed too small. The problem was mainly the setting—it’s hard to make a scene in a board room very visually interesting. I also wanted to make the son’s humiliation bigger.
I blew it up to the biggest example I could think of: the father pushes aside the Pope on the balcony of the Vatican and announces it to a crowd of half a million people. Or he goes on a national television show and announces it.
Of course those are not workable, but it got me to thinking: where could he logically announce it, where there are lots of people?
The idea that came up was a big trade show for their industry, which happens to be greeting cards. The father is speaking to a big crowd of people, everybody knows it’s supposed to be his fond farewell, and instead he announces he isn’t handing the company over to his son. Bigger, more humiliating, and visually more interesting.
The key with this method is not to be afraid to expand your mind by taking the situation to ridiculous extremes before you cut back to something that actually works.
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