Portraying "endurance"

When you need to show the overlap of strength, stamina, and determination.

Inneresting

May 31, 2023

This week’s rebroadcast from 2003 offers practical suggestions for showing a character testing their stamina and conquering physically demanding challenges.

Rocky IV training montage shot. Rocky pulls a dog sled through the snow. — BTS Sylvester Stallone doing motion capture for *Snow Dogs*.

I am working on a screenplay where I am trying to portray extreme endurance on the part of the main character. The problem is I am afraid that my method of illustrating this leads to a sort of monotony in my script. What creative approaches could I use to portray redundancy while maintaining the momentum of the story?
–Jonathan

If "endurance" is shown by having the character run for pages and pages, then yes, I think you’re right to worry that your script will be monotonous. But one of the amazing things about both movies and screenplays is that they can compress space and time to great effect.

For example, let’s say you had your character run from New York City to Miami without stopping. That’s pretty extreme endurance. If this action were supposed to take five days, you’d probably want to show the passage of time in some form: sunrises, sunsets, and shadows sweeping past in time-lapse. Maybe there would be rain storms that come and go. If your runner were a man, maybe you’d notice his beard growing.

Next, you’d need to show how far he’s running. You could cheese out and show a map of the Eastern seaboard, with an animated line charting his progress. Or, perhaps more cinematically, you could show his journey in relation to major geographic icons: running across the Brooklyn Bridge, through the Washington Mall, down the Georgia coast and into the heart of Miami’s hotel district.

Regardless of exactly how you show the journey, I suspect you could do it all in less than a minute of screen time, which means less than a page of script.

That’s a pretty economical way to establish this information.

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🗣 Have ideas for future topics (or just want to say hello)? Reach out to Chris via email at inneresting@johnaugust.com, or Mastodon @ccsont@mastodon.art

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