How to Construct scene Description 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, we're going to go into scene description and how scene description is laid out in the script. Okay, usually, you'll have the scene. So you'll say somebody's apartment or you'll just say scene two, usually. And then, you'll come down indent over and then you'll start listing the living room of Sonia Banning's one bedroom apartment. So, you'll basically give the information. These will some of the same information that will be given in the setting but you'll go more into detail with this. So you'll say, "It's well decorated. It's welcoming atmosphere," certain things about it. There's are books lying around. There's a futon sitting there. These will be some of the things you can say in here that would give some insight into the apartment. Then, you'd say there's a doorway. This way, a scenic designer can look through there, they'll say, "Okay, there's a doorway." There's well decorated so I'm going to have to think about some things I can do to decorate it. It's small, so there's things I can do with positioning the furniture to maybe make it look a little cramped. Maybe when I make the flats I'll make them, I'll have a little less space than traditionally used. Then maybe here in the stage direction, there's some costume notes. Evan comes in with a gas station clerk's uniform. So, that's something that the costume director is going to be able to make a note of, "Okay, I need that." So, these are some things that you can put in there. "She's wearing jeans and a sweatshirt." These are some things that you could say, "Oh, okay. Well, I'm staging this for small theater company. I know that the actress can bring some jeans and a sweatshirt. I know that the actor--I know a guy that works at the gas station. I can get that shirt easy. Okay, so those are some things that I can get. What else do we need for this scene?" And then, you look further down. And so, here, we have Sonia exits the kitchen. Okay, so there's going to be a kitchen in there. So, maybe you can just have little light offstage, you need an exit so that's going to be one of the things that you'll look for in the scene. You'll look for how many entrances and exits. These might be laid out right here. They might be laid out later in the scene. There's going to be a book. That's a prop, so certain props will be listed here in the scene directions. Clip boards, clattering drawers, this will be kind of a sound cue. You could have that actually being performed. There's a crash offstage. You can write that. Someone get a crash box or they can have a sound effect. These are the things that help the production staff know what they're going to be in for when they're staging your scene. And, of course, these are ways in which to lay this out on the page when you're writing a play."