The Process.
It hasn’t worked out yet for the Philadelphia 76ers and their attempts to build a championship team through high draft picks, but are there lessons for us as screenwriters in the idea of The Process?
An idea that struck me recently has to do with the idea of Culmination vs Process scenes.
Do movies usually show scenes that are the culmination of something? Or do they show us scenes which show the process of something happening?
I watched a video the other day from StudioBinder about training montages. You know, those sequences sweaty athletes go from hapless wannabe to well-oiled machine in the span of one inspirational song. It is a way of compressing months or years of training into a reasonable length for a movie audience.
It’s early days of thinking about this, so I haven’t done any actual analysis, but it is an interesting idea. Perhaps it is process scenes early, and culmination scenes at the end?
In a movie like Rocky, the culmination of the movie as a whole is Rocky’s bout with Apollo Creed. But is that the only culminating scene? Or are there culminating scenes scattered throughout?
Now that I think about it, it would make sense for there to be culminating scenes at the beginning, too. In many stories, the protagonist has to finish some aspect of their ordinary life before they will seek out the adventure of the movie. They have to lose their job, end a relationship, receive their call to adventure.
This then sets them on their transformation journey.
I would expect more process scenes in the early part of the second act, where the protagonist undertakes the lessons they will need to learn to pass the obstacles that block them from their goal. But even here, we need little victories and signposts to show their growth.
Anyway, I’m going to give some more thought to this and see how it might impact me when outlining and writing scenes.