The Beat Sheet – Part 1: Opening Image

Well, having settled upon a logline (for now anyway) it is time to move on to the Beat Sheet. For those of you just joining this blog then you should know that I’m following along with Blake Snyders book Save the Cat.

The Beat Sheet serves to create signpost for the script, and for those of us (like myself) who find themselves easily sidetracked then this is very important to establish before writing another draft.

Which brings us to the first beat…the opening image.

The opening image of the film should almost be a graphical representation of the entire film itself. Not the resolution of the film, but the set up. Of course, these are my thoughts regarding what an opening image should be, not necessarily Mr. Snyders.

Want an example of what I mean? Of course you do.

One of the best opening images EVER, and one that I think encapsulates Star Wars into a few minutes quite nicely. A small ship, out manned and out gunned, being pursued by an enormous and heavily armed warship. The Rebels against the Empire, Luke against Darth Vadar. The whole movie seems to be about the small at the mercy of the large. The weak being pursued by the strong. This is the universe in which the movie takes place, and the opening image sums up all of this in one shot.

Pretty impressive eh?

So what is the universe that Inferno is taking place in like? What is my protagonist like and how does he function in this universe? These are things I’ve got to think about when I create my opening image.

‘Hell is all around us, it’s of our own creation, and our apathy doesn’t make it go away’.

I think that simple phrase sums up what I want the opening image to convey, but how to go about it? If you head here then you’ll see the Beat Sheet as it applies to the movie The Wedding Crashers, and reading it leads me to believe that I’ve got a short paragraph to sum it all up. Wee.

As a quick aside, I think the Wedding Crashers beat sheet is written up from an instruction point of view, not from the writers perspective, so don’t try and copy it exactly.

Since this is the first beat though, I figure I should at least write this one down and start getting feedback on it. It probably won’t be a regular thing though, as I want to keep some of the script to myself. It would suck to actually sell the script but have no one come to see it because they can just come here and know all about it *grin*. Here it goes:

[The Hero] walks down the city street, briefcase in hand, repeatedly checking a small crumpled post-it note in his hand and the addresses on the buildings. Around him, filling the streets of this decaying neighborhood, the dregs of society. People are busy getting high, getting drunk, yelling and abusing their spouses, committing the oldest sins in the newest ways. [The Hero], dressed smartly in a suit, dismisses them all without a glance. They do not matter to him.

This opening image is just something I came up with on the spot and I’ll have to put a lot more thought into it. Is this where I want to open the film? In previous drafts I’ve had the film opening with the protagonist driving alone into the mountains, hinting at the isolation he himself feels from others and society as well. While that works if that’s what I want to do, the opening scene almost demands a change if I want to set up the universe so as to match what I wrote earlier about Hell being all around us.

Needs more thought. Will get back to you all later.