The Scene That Broke The Whole Script
Segun Iwasanmi@iwasanmisegun212159
1 day ago
© Segun Iwasanmi
✍️✍️✍️
There was a time I almost stopped watching Nollywood completely. Back then, what irritates me are those movies where everybody is talking, shouting, threatening and crying but somehow nothing is really happening? Before the first thirty minutes finish, you have already guessed who will die, who will marry, and who will suddenly confess a secret they have been keeping since secondary school. The whole thing felt like a very long family meeting with better lighting.
Then films from people like Funke Akindele and Gabriel Afolayan started pulling me back. It's not even because they had bigger cameras or more money, but because the stories felt alive. The characters behaved like people you could actually meet on your street, which sounds like a simple thing until you realize how many scripts completely fail at it.
I once read a script that was moving beautifully. The hero was clear, the conflict was building naturally, the tension was doing its job. Then one scene entered from nowhere and scattered everything. The character we had been rooting for suddenly behaved like a completely different person with zero build-up, zero explanation, just a completely new human being wearing the same name. I kept reading that script with a squeezed face for a while after that scene, turning it over, trying to understand where the writer lost the thread. Because that one scene did not just confuse me, it quietly cancelled everything the earlier scenes had built. I kept reading but I stopped believing, and once a reader stops believing, you have lost them even if they finish the script.
Stories are a lot like relationships in that way. People can forgive mistakes. What they struggle to forgive is confusion. Whenever I work on scripts, one thing I pay very close attention to is whether each scene has earned its place. Not just whether it is interesting, but whether it is pushing something forward, revealing something important, or deepening the conflict in a way that makes the next scene more necessary. Anything that cannot do at least one of those things is occupying space and still collecting rent. Double wahala 😀.
That is why some productions with brilliant ideas still feel unfinished on screen. The problem is rarely the concept. Sometimes it is just one scene sitting comfortably in the middle, shaking the entire building while everybody is busy admiring the paint on the wall. And the painful part is that most writers never catch it until someone else reads it with fresh eyes and points directly at it.
Follow for more tips.. 🔥
© Segun Iwasanmi | ™The Man With The Story.
Book Writer | Screen and Scriptwriter | Creative Fiction writer | Book Editor.
I help people turn rough ideas into bold stories that work
