Scribbler’s Playbook

// START HERE

What this course is

You’ve shot twenty setups. The footage looks good. The performances feel real. The music hits. But when you watch it back, something’s off — it drags in places, certain cuts feel wrong, and you can’t explain why.

Here’s what probably happened: you skipped the first step. Before you shoot a single frame, before you think about cameras or coverage or cuts, you need to scribble one sentence. One tight emotional question. That sentence becomes your GPS for every decision you make afterward, and this course is what to do with it once you have it.

It’s aimed at short-form work — short films, YouTube videos, essay pieces, mini-docs, anything from sixty seconds to half an hour. The examples come from Breaking Bad, Stranger Things, Get Out, Dune, Carol, Flight, and from rooms I’ve worked in on Alias, Lost, Heroes, and Hannibal.

// THE WORKSHEETS

Every lesson ends in something you fill in

Each lesson has a worksheet built from its own checklist — the Emo Q, the opening plan, the scene audit, the container, the shot plan, the edit pass, the final alignment audit. Two more come from the Scribble Worksheets library and serve any project: the full character interrogation and the location development questions.

They’re real fill-in worksheets, not printouts of questions. Type into them and they save to your browser as you go. Print or save as PDF when you want them on the desk next to the monitor — and when you want to keep them, since a browser will drop the saved copy after about a week without a visit.