A WIDE SHOT OF SEA AND SKY AS DAEDALUS, WINGS BEATINGFURIOUSLY, RA...

10. A wide shot of sea and sky as Daedalus, wings beating

furiously, races to catch the boy. A shot of Icarus, plummeting

down. The camera follows as he plunges into the sea and the

water closes over his head. He descends slowly underwater,

twisting and turning.

As often happens, another image presented itself as a possible final one

after we had finished the outline:

10a. A wide shot, with Daedalus circling above the place where his son

vanished, calling Icarus’s name over and over.

This last shot may not work in the film, because it leaves us contemplat-

ing Daedalus’s suffering rather than that of our protagonist, Icarus. But it is

worth thinking about, possibly even shooting, with the final decision left for

the editing room.

REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

If you look over the outline, you will see that each step represents a scene

that forwards the action, whether the scene is more or less continuous in

time or is a single unit taking place at different times.

For instance, the first step essentially sets up the main character’s situation

and shows tension between Icarus and his father, even hinting at the struggle

that will develop between them. Step 2 is a variation on this and could easily

be considered a part of 1. Step 3 shows us Icarus as a dreamer, imagining him-

self a seagull. Step 4 shows us Icarus carrying the fantasy a degree farther, and

Step 5, even farther—to the point where he forgets himself enough to disturb

Daedalus as he works.

Then we have the reprimand, the boy’s display of anger at his father, and

Daedalus’s realization that he might be able to craft wings for them of feath-

ers and wax. From this point until step 9, each scene moves the two charac-

ters toward escape from the tower—and Icarus’s escape from his father.

Looking over the outline, you can see that there is nothing extraneous—

everything counts. A writer has more freedom in writing a longer script, but

digressions that are pleasurable in a feature are apt to lose the audience in a

short film. Still, there are aspects of the story that have not yet been explored.

For instance, in writing the actual screenplay, we would want to be sure to

develop the suspense latent in Step 7, when the jailer comes into the chamber,

as well as the mounting tension in Icarus’s struggle to stay aloft as his father

tries desperately to reach him.

A screenplay is a narrative, and one of the tasks of any narrative, whatever

the medium, is to engage the curiosity of its audience. How? By the time-hon-

ored method of “raising questions in their minds, and delaying the

answers,” as novelist and critic David Lodge writes in The Art of Fiction.

Lodge believes that the questions raised in narrative “are broadly of two

kinds, having to do with causality (e.g., whodunit?) and temporality (e.g.,

what will happen next?), each exhibited in a very pure form by the classic

detective story and the adventure story, respectively.”

The particular challenge for writers of short scripts is that there usually

isn’t time to establish the protagonist’s character and plight in a leisurely