skills/film-development/references/DRAMATURGY.md

# Dramaturgy — the story in the viewer's words, and action that photographs

Load this beside `SCREENWRITING.md` whenever a film is written from an idea or a
supplied script is prepared for production. `SCREENWRITING.md` says what the
medium can afford; this file says what the story has to *do*, in the one
artifact the user reads: **the story**. No later shot or prompt may introduce a
fact, motive, relationship or outcome that the story never wrote down.

## The story — ten lines, then every scene as what we see and hear

One document, shown in chat, written *after* the look console is locked and to
its genre (`../SKILL.md`, Stage 1 step 3). It replaced the scenario-plus-script
pair on the evening of 2026-09-09: the script had gone to a file the user never
saw, the story was read for the first time when the videos existed, and every
change then cost a shot-list board.

**The head — ten lines**, plain words:

```text
Who        the one or two people the film is with, one line each
Where      the place, and the time of day — one place unless the story needs two
Wants      what each of them wants
Against    what stands in the way — the other person, the heat, the clock
Happens    three or four beats, one line each, in order
Peak       which beat the film is built toward, and what changes there
Ends       the last thing we see
Says       the one thing the viewer is left with, in one sentence
Fixed      what the user's brief fixed — events, ending, facts — quoted, never assumed
Genre      the console's lock, in one word, and what that means for the beats
```

**Then the scenes — what we see and hear, in order.** One paragraph per scene
(two for a long one), in the viewer's words:

- The first sentence says where we are and the time of day — and, from the
  second scene on, what tells the viewer this is the same place or a new one.
- Then what happens, one action at a time, in the playable shape below; the
  lines in quotes, said by name; the last sentence is an action, not a line.
- The scene's length in seconds closes it, sized from its words (about 2.5
  words a second, plus a second of silence after each line) and its actions.
- **No camera words** (close-up, wide, over-the-shoulder, pan), **no film
  vocabulary** (beat, turn, payoff, cold open), **no production notes** ("grip
  and weight, never blows"). A reader who knows nothing about film reads it as
  the film.
- **If a fact matters, it is on screen in the paragraph.** The water is seen,
  not asserted; who holds it is visible, not implied.
- A scene is one place at one time of day; the story changes place only where
  it needs to — never to give a video somewhere to end
  (`../../film-scenes/references/SEAMS.md`).

Illustrative only — not project canon:

```text
Who        Rasa, who owns a flask with one swallow left. Nen, who has none.
Where      a dead standpipe on a concrete square, noon, white dust.
Wants      Rasa: to keep walking. Nen: the water.
Against    each other; two days of nothing in every direction.
Happens    Rasa checks her flask and Nen sees the water. Nen runs and hits her.
           They fight over the strap into the shade and down onto the concrete.
           Nen smashes the flask on the pump and the water runs into the dust.
Peak       the smash — the thing they are both fighting for hits the dust.
Ends       the camera pulls back until they are two specks on an empty plain.
Says       two people can want the same thing badly enough to destroy it.
Fixed      "two girls fighting to get a last drop of water" · it spills · 90 s · 16:9
Genre      action — the fight is on the page: a charge, a throw, a fall, a smash.

Scene 2 — the square, noon, a few steps from the pump, right after scene 1.
Rasa stops and checks what she has left. She tips her flask over her palm;
the last of the water spreads across her hand. She looks at it, does not
drink, and caps the flask. Nen has been watching from the pump. "That's
water." She drops her empty cup on its cord, runs across the square and goes
straight for the flask. Rasa clamps both hands on it. Nen slams into her
shoulder-first and Rasa's feet leave the ground. They hit the concrete in the
shade of the wall, both still holding the flask. About 30 seconds.
```

**Fixed** comes from the brief the user actually gave; a required event is
never changed to satisfy a line. Enrich only what the brief leaves open, and
say so ("assumed: the pump is on a concrete square") so an assumption can be
corrected before it becomes canon. The genre line is what stops a drama being
written under an action lock: read it back before the scenes.

**A change is a rewritten paragraph.** When the user says what to change —
"Nen should grab the water", "more talk in scene 3" — the scene's paragraph is
rewritten and shown in the next message, and the yes comes on the new text.
Never a board, never a table of shots, never a list of options
(`../SKILL.md`, *A story note is answered with a paragraph*).

## Playable action

Write every action that matters in one shape:

```text
starting condition -> subject + precise verb + target or path
  -> resistance or contact -> visible reaction -> resulting condition
```

"Walks cinematically", "looks emotional", "takes in the room" are blanks the
model fills with drift; an internal change needs an observable correlative. The
action can be small — counting coins below a counter while steering a child's
gaze is playable because hands, concealment, attention, contact and result all
photograph. A fight is the same shape, one big clear action per shot: *she
runs the length of the square and slams into her shoulder-first; Rasa's feet
leave the ground* — not a flurry.

**Dialogue is action.** Block a dialogue scene as action before polishing a
line: each speaker's objective, what each conceals, the tactic each line
performs, what is revealed or withheld and the behaviour it produces. Cut, or
rewrite as behaviour: exposition both speakers know, a character naming their
own feeling, a line that performs no action, a reveal with no reaction, a line
longer than its shot (`SCREENWRITING.md` §5).

**The first scene opens on what a synopsis cannot give a viewer**: who owns
our attention, where they are in usable spatial terms, what they are doing
right now, what they want, what pressure has begun — through behaviour, in the
first seconds, never an empty room and never a pose. **And the thing the story
is about is seen in the first scene** — the handbook: *"The first shot should
promise an ending."* A film about water shows water before anyone speaks of it.

## Before showing the story

Read it once as a stranger and fix it in the text, not in a note to the user:
is the thing everyone wants seen before anyone speaks of it; would a viewer
know who has it, and where the people are, at every moment; does every scene's
first sentence say how we got here; does the genre line match what happens;
is anything in **Fixed** distorted; does anything in the scenes belong to
another time or world than **Where** says — a phone in 1962, a wristwatch in a
far future — since a wrong object here becomes a scene picture and then a run
(2026-09-09); is there a scene that only explains, or whose seconds hold no
action — cut it or fold it into its neighbour (2026-09-09). On 2026-09-08 the
film never showed water until the twenty-sixth second of its second scene, and
the user found it at hour four. This is the writer's own check inside the
drafting turn — not a gate, not a question to the user. The one exception:
where a fix would touch **Fixed**, leave the text and say it in one line under
the story — that is the user's call.