skills/ai-film-pipeline-master/references/phase-02-screenplay-dialogue/symptoms-scene-shape.md

# Scene shape complaints

Part of the symptom router. Open this file when the complaint is about scene shape. Each complaint below is followed by the cards that repair it, best first; `LOOKUP.md` says which file holds each card.

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### "I need a specific kind of scene"

**By who is in the room:** two people `scene.two_hander` · a group `scene.ensemble_scene` · a child present `scene.child_present` · in front of an outsider `scene.before_a_stranger` · someone who does not know they are in it `scene.unaware_participant` · nobody speaking `scene.silent_scene`

**Across distance:** a call cut between both rooms `scene.phone_call_split` · only one side heard `scene.one_sided_call` · in a moving vehicle `scene.moving_vehicle` · waiting for news `scene.waiting_room`

**Across language:** a character working in a second language `scene.second_language_scene` · a line deliberately left untranslated `scene.untranslated_line`

**By length and shape:** one line `scene.one_line_scene` · one continuous action `scene.single_action_scene` · development without conflict `scene.kishotenketsu_scene` · `scene.development_scene`

**Arrivals and departures:** `scene.arrival_scene` · `scene.departure_scene`

### "The scene doesn't orient the reader"

1. Give it the orientation beat — where, when, who, in that order and fast
   `scene.orientation_beat`
2. Or open on an object or on a reaction instead of on a place
   `scene.opening_on_object` · `scene.opening_on_reaction`
3. Length should follow the size of the value that turns, not the amount of material
   `scene.length_follows_value`

### "The scenes don't join"

1. End on a cause, open on a question
   `scene.cause_out_question_in`
2. Join on an image or a sound that matches across the cut
   `scene.match_join` · `scene.prelap_join`
3. Close the scene on the question rather than the answer
   `scene.close_on_question` · `scene.button`

### "The montage isn't working"

1. A montage needs a turn like any other unit
   `scene.montage_value_turn`
2. One theme per montage — two makes it a sequence badly cut
   `scene.montage_single_theme`

### "The crosscut is confusing"

1. Establish both threads at length before shortening the fragments
   `scene.crosscut_pair`
2. Accelerate by shortening, never by adding threads
   `scene.crosscut_acceleration`
3. If the two strands comment on each other, make the irony deliberate
   `scene.ironic_parallel`

### "The wordless scene reads as empty"

1. Decide which channel carries the meaning and keep the others quiet
   `scene.wordless_channel_discipline`
2. Give them a shared task, not a shared feeling
   `scene.silent_scene`

### "I've attacked this scene twice and it still fails"

1. Third attempt: change the shape, not the lines
   `scene.third_attack` · `scene.change_the_shape`
2. Different room, different number of people, different length
   `scene.transplant` · `scene.two_hander` · `scene.ensemble_scene`

### "He stopped talking in the middle of the interview"

Three different failures wear that description and they turn on different values, so decide which one you are in before writing a line: the subject stops answering, the subject retracts something already said, or the subject turns the question back on you.

1. The card separates the three. The *stop* turns on cost — the subject has calculated what the answer will do to somebody else, and the scene's job is to make that calculation visible without narrating it. The *retraction* turns on the record. The *turned question* is a status flip, and the interviewer's answer, or refusal, is the scene
   `scene.interview_breaks` · `char.status_flip`
2. The evasion is the content. A subject who refuses the same question three times has told the audience something an answer never could, so stay in the room rather than cutting to the next question
   `tens.waiting_as_weapon`
3. And do not follow them. An interviewer who accepts the subject's preferred subject has conceded the scene, and the audience registers the concession immediately
   `dial.topic_change` · `dial.deflection`
4. The failure to avoid is a decent refusal staged as evasion. An audience sides with a person protecting somebody else faster than it sides with a reporter, and a scene built to make that refusal look guilty loses its own case
5. Do not stack two of these in one piece. The second reads as the interviewer's technique failing rather than as the subject's choice

### "She's performing her own life at me"

She has seen documentaries, she has pride, and what you are filming is her chosen version of her behaviour. That is not a fault to be removed — audiences recognise performance-of-self on sight, and a film that pretends it is not happening loses them.

1. Cut to the seam, not around it. The usable moment is where the performance slips, where she checks whether it landed, or where two performers in the same room contradict each other's version. That seam is the scene's turn
   `scene.performed_for_camera`
2. Write the *reason* she is performing, because there always is one and it is usually the most interesting fact in the scene — for a dead parent, for the neighbours, for a version of herself from 1991
3. Arrangement has to be declared. Re-shooting a routine action is legitimate and universal; staging an event that would not otherwise have happened is a different thing, and if it stays in the piece the audience has to be told, on screen
   `expo.disclosed_staging_note`
4. Two failures on either side: a film built entirely from people's preferred versions of themselves, which is a brochure whatever the camera is doing; and cutting a contributor's self-presentation for laughs, which the audience reads as the film picking on somebody who trusted it
5. For the piece-to-camera address rather than the observed scene, and for the gap between a line and a body
   `voice.confessional_to_camera` · `sub.behaviour_contradicts`

### "It's built from a transcript and it sounds like a transcript"

The whole craft here is subtraction and juxtaposition, and the form's only asset is that it is not making anything up — which is why the rules are strict rather than stylistic.

1. Cut only, never add. The moment you write a connecting clause into somebody's mouth the form's claim collapses and you have a drama with real names in it. Cover the join with an acknowledged bridge instead — a narrator, a caption, a stage direction
   `scene.transcript_built`
2. Cast for disagreement rather than coverage. The material is the contradiction between two accounts of the same night; four people who agree are one long interview
3. Keep the hesitations that mean something and cut the ones that do not. Where the pause *is* the answer, cutting it is the form's commonest act of vandalism — and get the question inside the answer in the room, because the question will be removed later
4. How much to clean the line, and the transcript as a voice you did not choose, are separate cards
   `rhythm.transcript_clean` · `voice.transcript_voice`
5. If there is no conflict in the transcript, no amount of cutting produces a scene. Verbatim shapes material; it does not generate story. And it is the wrong form where anonymity is required and a distinctive idiom is a fingerprint

### "Two true things next to each other are implying something untrue"

1. That is `scene.false_adjacency` — the frankenbite: an answer built from two answers, a reaction cut in from a different conversation, a reply the speaker gave to a question that was never put to them, presented as one continuous exchange. Every word can be theirs and they still never said it
2. It costs nothing until it is found out, and then it retroactively falsifies every other scene in the piece, with the contributor's account of what happened becoming the story instead of the film's
3. The diagnostic is mechanical. Take every cut inside an answer and every reaction shot, and write on the edit list what the person was actually responding to at the moment that frame was recorded. Where you cannot answer, you have either a problem or a piece of work to do
4. The honest neighbours do the same job and should be used instead — shorten an answer without changing what it claims, cover the join with archive rather than with a jump the audience will read as concealment, and where a contributor said it better in a second sitting, use the second sitting whole
   `scene.transcript_built`
5. A contributor who approves the stitched version afterwards is not an exception. Their approval covers the sentence, not the claim that they said it then, to that question, in that room
6. The same offence committed in the image rather than in the cut is the unmarked reconstruction, and it is held in the Information section
   `scene.reconstruction_unmarked`

### "He has nothing to bargain with"

`seq.negotiation_sequence` hands this case away, and is right to: with no alternative there is no negotiation, so the scene cannot run on concessions and has to run on something else.

1. Write the three instruments the powerless actually have — time, which is delay and presence and coming back on Tuesday; witnesses; and the strong party's self-image, which is almost always the real lever. The scene turns on which one they reach for and on what reaching for it costs them
   `scene.no_leverage`
2. The absolute requirement: the strong party must want something non-material in the scene. If they want nothing at all there is no scene, only a refusal
3. Write the cost in a concrete unit. Not her dignity — the words she has to say about her own son to get the form stamped
4. A third person who can see it changes the arithmetic, which is why the room is worth as much attention as the line
   `scene.public_scene` · `scene.before_a_stranger`
5. End one beat after she spends the thing, not at the moment he says yes. And do not run a third one: the shape is static by design, and by the third instance it reads as the writer's thesis rather than the character's week
   `scene.early_exit` · `scene.trap_scene`

### "The duty changes hands and the scene is a blessing speech"

What is moving is an obligation rather than an object — the care of someone, the keeping of a record, the running of a place, the silence about something — and the drama is whether it is genuinely accepted.

1. Build it in three parts: the naming of what the duty actually is, in the smallest possible terms — not "the family" but *Tuesdays, and the phone bill, and you never tell her about Nabil* — then the transfer, which can be one word, then the first act performed under it. Cut the middle if you must; never cut the third, because a handover without a first act is a promise and audiences do not believe promises
   `scene.handover`
2. The giver has to lose something by giving it, or the scene is a relief rather than a turn. And let the receiver get one detail wrong immediately, because competence in the first minute makes the duty look light
3. It is not a transaction, and an object usually gets in the way
   `scene.transaction_scene`
4. If two people are competing for the role, it is a different scene and a different card
   `rel.succession_fight`
5. The failure mode is the speech in which the older character explains what the duty means. That is theme delivered as dialogue, and it removes the only thing the scene had, which was doubt

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