Kindle Notes & Highlights
1. What do I want?: SCENE OBJECTIVE. 2. Why do I want it so badly?: OBSTACLES, SUBSTITUTION, and INNER OBJECTS. Your OBSTACLES, SUBSTITUTION, and INNER OBJECTS provide you with a need to win your SCENE OBJECTIVE. 3. Why do I want it so badly right now?: MOMENT BEFORE. The MOMENT BEFORE increases your need to win your SCENE OBJECTIVE by giving it urgency and immediacy.
MOMENT BEFORE is the tool that moves you into the appropriate urgent mental, physical and emotional space for the scene.
MOMENT BEFORE gives you a place to begin
The MOMENT BEFORE helps you know why and where you’re coming from and how badly you presently...
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APPLYING THE MOMENT BEFORE
1. Determine what personal event will produce a high-stakes need.
2. Just before the director says,“Action!” or right before you walk on stage, give yourself about a minute to relive the personal event you’ve chosen.Think about it as if the event has just happened.
3. To relive the event, remember every detail.
Your personal event choice for a MOMENT BEFORE must affect you easily and immediately.
Don’t use an event that has been resolved.
You’ll only know if a MOMENT BEFORE event is unresolved and usable by trying it.
The truth of comedy is that the inner choices an actor makes must be more desperate, painful, angry and darker than drama!
A WHAT IF event is what it sounds like: an imagined experience born out of a deep-seated, well-founded personal fear.
To use a WHAT IF event as your MOMENT BEFORE, you imagine all the details of an event that could happen as if it has happened.
The MOMENT BEFORE event must have a germ of possibility, and even better, the odds of probability.
her MOMENT BEFORE: WHAT IF she found out that her boyfriend was with someone else? Amy then made the fear real to her by picturing it happening—actually visualizing her boyfriend in sexual congress with a girl.
Imagining a traumatic event happening yet again is an effective choice to use for your MOMENT BEFORE.
it’s vital that you never judge your character, no matter how heinous your character behaves.
People who do evil acts don’t see them as such—they always have a justifiable reason.
Your MOMENT BEFORE event should come from an emotional relationship point of view.
Although a particular event might not be so terrible when viewed in and of itself, when it is compounded by previous other bad events, it can turn an otherwise unpleasant event into something excruciating.
Remember: The MOMENT BEFORE is an event that takes place before the scene begins and makes you not just want but need the SCENE OBJECTIVE, urgently and immediately.
If the SCENE OBJECTIVE is “make you love me,” then an appropriate MOMENT BEFORE is something that has happened to you recently or a worst fear event (a WHAT IF event) that makes you shamelessly and desperately need to
be loved right now.
If the SCENE OBJECTIVE is “to get you to give me my power back,” then an appropriate MOMENT BEFORE is something that has happened to you recently or a worst-fear event (a WHAT IF event) that makes you urgently need to get your power back right now.
If your SCENE OBJECTIVE is “to get you to worship me” or “to get you to look up to me,” then you must have a MOMENT BEFORE that makes you feel so small and diminished that it becomes essential that you achieve your SCENE OBJECTIVE, because it’s the only way to feel confident again.
Before first-time sex (for both men and women):
If you’re a woman, think about breast-size issues, fat or cellulite in places that only the act of sex can reveal, a propensity for being too vocal or too quiet, weird sexual predilections that might make you look like a slut or a prude, etc.
After first-time sex (for both men and women):
If you’re a woman, think about breast-size issues, fat or cellulite that can and has been discovered during the act, your propensity to be too loud or too quiet, weird sexual predilections coming forward making you look like a slut or a prude, etc.
MOMENT BEFORE event should be one that will trigger the fight.
The SCENE OBJECTIVE for each character is “to get you to take the blame so I don’t have to feel guilty anymore.”
MOMENT BEFORE could be to imagine a tragic event that’s happened to you (or a WHAT IF a specific tragic event that you fear could happen were to take place) and that you feel very guilty about.
SUBSTITUTION choice would be the person who you want to believe caused the tragedy.
Both characters have the SCENE OBJECTIVE of “to get you to admit that you abused me (so that I can be the injured party).”
For this scene, your MOMENT BEFORE would be to recall the most abusive event that was caused by your SUBSTITUTION.
SCENE OBJECTIVE for a make-up scene is usually “to get you to forgive me,” or “to get you to give me absolution.”
MOMENT BEFORE: Think of an event that makes you feel that you were wrong, something that instills great guilt in you.
Remember: The MOMENT BEFORE is a real or WHAT IF event that takes place before the scene begins and that makes you need your SCENE OBJECTIVE to happen ASAP.
if it doesn’t affect you within a minute, then continue to try other MOMENT BEFORE choices until you find one that really drives your SCENE OBJECTIVE.
Endowing your character’s physical reality with attributes from a PLACE and FOURTH WALL from your real life.
The PLACE/FOURTH WALL must support and make sense to the choices you’ve made for the other tools.
“What PLACE from my life will inform and make the choices I’ve already made have even higher stakes?”
To find your PLACE, you must first identify where the scene in the script takes place. Inside or outside? Is the inside or outside space private or public?
then correlate the script’s space with a PLACE from your life.
You must always consider the scene’s inherent OBSTACLES in making a choice for PLACE.
Always reproduce the physical aspects of the script from an emotional point of view.
Once you’ve identified a few locations that you might use as your PLACE, based on your SCENE OBJECTIVE and SUBSTITUTION, you must create it.
Creating PLACE means that you endow the location—set, stage, classroom—with attributes from your personal PLACE.
Remember notable parts about your ex-mate’s living room.
