After reading both McKee's and Weston's approach to scene analysis, I will have to agree more with Weston. McKee makes some critical and important points, however, I feel as if he is missing some more detail then just pointing out what the conflicts, beats, and emotional charges are. Weston goes into much detail and poses many question for the analyst to discover trough the readings. I fell as if Weston is more of a detective, wanting to find out every detail and McKee is the rookie in the force still learning and assuming what happens. Ironically, McKee is a well known popular writing instructor. I would like to bring up another point... Is being simpler better? But, My opinion still stands with Weston's ideas.
As I went through the scene from "Sex, Lies, and Videotapes", I found, as mentioned before, Weston's approach to be more helpful. McKee's goes a lot faster than Weston's, but I think Weston will help the the reader more. I noticed that I understood more about the characters with Weston's approach because it was really character and conflict driven. I got every detail down when it came to Weston, and with McKee, like when we analyzed a scene in class from "The Apartment", it was fast and simple; I felt I didn't learn as much as I did with Weston.
A prime example of this can be page 163 in Weston as we are in the middle of the scene in "Sex, Lies, and Videotapes". If I were to be analyzing with McKee's methods, I would simply state that the conflict on this page is that John is ignoring Ann's comments about her sister and that John brings up Elizabeth, Graham's ex-girlfriend, which Graham is caught off guard about. My personal opinion is that this scene is negative because none of the characters seem excited. I would break down the beats and note the closing value. After this I log everything on a paper. With Weston's approach, I'm asking myself every possible I can ask. I want to know what every character is thinking, what they are going to think, how they act and react to situations, the outcomes of the situations, why the characters reacted in a certain way, going through each character versus the other character, what their conversations or actions were like, etc.
I enjoy the analysis parts of scripts, but I feel that because so much work has been put into scripts they should be analyzed in a nearly equal way. Weston's approach is much more sufficient.
Discussion Questions:
1) Did anyone else feel like McKee's approach is too petty and easy compared to Weston's?
2) As the story, I thought this screenplay owned. It was not as technical as "Adaptation". You opinion on this , please?
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3 comments:
Adaptation is clearly superior to sex, lies & videotape. While I do agree that Soderbergh's script is less technical and descriptive, the story and characters are not nearly as interesting or fun as the ones found in Kaufman's script.
I know this story is more grounded in the real world and these are "real people". But this is just ok, Adaptaion is the jumpoff.
I definitely liked Weston's approach better. I felt that Mckee's was too simple. It didn't make you think about those crucial lines or events that drive the scene. I felt that it was more like him giving us instructions to follow in order to analyze the scene without making us think deeper.
As a novice, I personally found McKee to be more useful when analyzing the script. I think the structure of his method allows one to first identify the important components within a script which can then be used to delve into more detail later on.
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