Scene help please?

Creator's Corner Directing Help & Tips
1

Hi, new here. I was just wondering if anyone knows how to or if its possible to make a scene go really fast, like speed the whole thing up. I am wanting to do a scene where my character repeats the same things every day, get up, work, eat, meetintgs, sleep, wake up and repeat but I am wanting to make it all go fast to give it depth. If that makes sense? so the reader can see she is repeating the same boring routine day after day for a while to get more of a sense of the characters life.

1 Like
2

I think it’s not possible to speed up the actual speed of the animations itself, but there are several workarounds for this.

  • you can make the very first scene (the one that will be repeated) extra slow, so the latter ones look faster. For example, you can use the pan comment this way:
    @pan to zone 4 which is a fast pan,

    or like this

    @pan to zone 2
    @pan to zone 3
    @pan to zone 4 which makes it a very slow pan

  • then you could work with fast fade in and fade outs (you can specify a duration) that results in fast flickering in and out of the scene. It’ll feel like she’s been doing it for ages, like it keeps going on and on. Some writers use it for flashback sequences or “anxiety scenes” so to speak, but I think it could work for this.

  • You can also make custom backgrounds of screenshots of your character performing an action, screenshots from the first scene, and place those backgrounds very fast after each other, a little similar to the previous bulletpoint.

But honestly it’s very tricky all this, and I can’t tell you exactly how I would do it because I’m pretty new to the writing myself :slight_smile:

Edit:I also think there are more transition available than fades, maybe that could help you? https://episodesupport.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115004162293-Advanced-Directing-Transitions-Overview

3

If you do
&CHARACTER is animation
@pause for 0.5
The animation will go faster I think :upside_down_face:

4

If I were you I would suggest a sort of montage, where you show bits from each of the scenes where she does her daily things; for example:

  • instead of showing her entire morning run you just have her run across the screen with a street background and her running clothes on
  • instead of showing her at school all day you show her walking through the hallway from offscreen to offscreen, and/or sitting at a desk in class reading a book
  • instead of showing her whole dinner scene with her family, you show her sitting at the table doing an eating animation
  • etc. and you show each of these for like one @pause for a beat, over and over, and you could put a quick one of her sleeping in bed at the end every time to demonstrate that this goes on for days and days.