“12 Years a Slave”: Scene By Scene Breakdown

The practice of reading scripts is critical to learn the craft of screenwriting. One key to this practice is to work with a scene-by-scene breakdown of the script.

Here is my take on this exercise from a previous series of posts — How To Read A Screenplay:

After a first pass, it’s time to crack open the script for a deeper analysis and you can do that by creating a scene-by-scene breakdown. It is precisely what it sounds like: A list of all the scenes in the script accompanied by a brief description of the events that transpire.