How to Construct Scene Synopsis Page for Plays

Video Transcript

"STEVE CAVERNO: Steve Caverno, on behalf of Expert Village, here today to talk to you about formatting and play production. Now, similarly to the time and place section, you might have several scenes. You might have a lot of different scenes and unit sets where it takes place in ten different locations. In that case, you might want to write a scene synopsis. Scene synopsis will look something like, Scene one, two, three, four, five, and so on. And then in Scene one, you would have a farm, maybe the barn. And then maybe the scene two, you would have an old shed outside the barn, so that would be--and then maybe at scene three, you would have the house. And maybe here you would have all the chicken cages. It might be kinda complex to do on stage, but anything is possible. And then over here, you might have the driveway which would be kinda complex to do on stage, but it could just be shown. It could just be a piece of that. So, right here, you have the farm and then so, and now the scenic designer is thinking, "Okay. We'll, I'm going to have--we have to have a unit set. We have to have something to where I can show all of these on stage at the same time. So, let me have a barn, okay? Maybe I can show just a piece of a barn with the flat. Then, I'll just have this door, and I'll have this flat of the barn. Then maybe, I can modify that flat. Maybe I can perhaps move the flat. I can pivot it around, and have the shed on the other side just briefly showing that. Perhaps, then the house, maybe this barn, this door can move forward creating a back wall where we have the house, then maybe the chicken cages can actually be the house, but you move all the furniture out, and place some cages in here. And then maybe this house moves offstage, and we just have the open driveway where we just see this." And if you have a big enough production, you maybe have a representation of a car sitting right there. Now, these are very elaborate sets. Your set probably won't be this big. But if you are doing this, you might want to have-you want to have an outline of the scenes, where your scenes are going to be. And these are just basically so the reader and so the audience even will know where these places are occurring. You won't have to necessarily turn to the pages of the script to know. You won't have any surprises. If they get halfway through the play and realize they're going to have this major scene change and it doesn't really work for their budget, and there's no way around it, then they're going to get a little annoyed because they've read through your whole play and then they realized they can't do it even though they really like it so much. So, this is a good place to give them an idea of what they're in store for."