The scene is the unit of work.

How do you work on a screenplay?

Breaking it down into it’s first, big parts helps. Those parts are the scenes.

As actors, directors, writers, producers we work on plays and films scene by scene. They’re the units of work.

You shoot scenes out of order, so you must work on each scene as a separate entity. Its own whole.

What are the features of a scene?
Beginning, middle and end. Occupies it’s own time and space different from the other scenes. Can move the plot forward. Has its own event. Each character wants something specific. It, along with all the other scenes, makes up the play.

To call scenes the units of work helps define the one thing leads to the next. Or, step by step.

When you’re in that scene – that situation – you have to be fully there and nowhere else. 

Within a scene there are beats. Beats – as described by Stanislavsky – are the next size of the play that can be worked on. The next smaller piece that can be dealt with. There may only be one beat governing the whole scene, or a transition making a second beat. Characters talking about the same topic, in similar tones, same time and space. That’s a beat.

Then, there are lines, individual words and punctuation. Smaller and smaller parts to be looked at. All of this makes up a scene and all the scenes make up the screenplay.

It’s like building a house.

In episodic television what happens in one scene does not necessarily make sense in relation to other scenes. Learn to play the truth of each scene and try not to get diverted by trying to follow an arc.       

Episodic television really proves that the scene is the unit of work.