Storytelling 102: Lessons from Squid Game

Beat Sheets, Outlines, and Tedious (but useful) Mechanics

“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”

—Jack London

“I only write when I’m inspired, so I see to it that I’m inspired every morning at nine o’clock.”

—Peter De Vries

Storytelling is an emotional craft. 

There’s a certain magic to our favorite films, and novels. Fiction offers a window, and a mirror into the deepest, loneliest parts of the human soul. Reading a great book can tease possibilities, provoke unfamiliar sentiments, and engulf the audience in the adventures and nightmares of faraway landscapes.

The rage of Michael Corleone… The despair of Edmond Dantes… The jealousy of Scarlett O’Hara… The stubborn pride of Elizabeth Bennet… The ruthless ambition of Frank Underwood… The ingenious curiosity of Sherlock Holmes…

Passions emerge with startling intensity. 

Vivid colors, painted with violent splashes onto an opulent canvas.  

Brilliant ideas tend to arrive in a flash of inspiration, sudden and unexpected. Intense, radiant thunderbolts of imagination strike artists, and in those moments, work can become swift; frenzied; effortless. 

Creativity seems mysterious. And elusive. 

The human mind is not a factory, pumping out a steady assembly line of perceptive epiphanies and lovely thoughts. Unlike robots, energy ebbs and flows. Productivity spikes and dips with extreme variance. 

But I believe these general truths — that humans are emotional, that productivity is unpredictable, and that impassioned, exuberant moods maximize achievement — encourage negligent habits. 

Amateur writers tend to delay work. They wait for inspiration. In effect, they only work when they enjoy it. Over time, inspiration dwindles to a sporadic rivulet. Stress builds. Habitual delays exacerbate feelings of anxiety, neuroticism, and self-loathing. Unsurprisingly, this stress has a negative impact. 

If you only work when work is fun, you will quickly discover that work stops ever being fun. Even small tasks start to loom in the distance like icebergs, mountains, tentacled Lovecraftian behemoths that are shrouded by fog. 

The best thing about self-inflicted mistakes is that they can be individually corrected. 

What I recommend to frustrated, aspiring artists is to write three paragraphs on a daily basis. 

The paragraphs can be short. Sentences can be ugly, and incoherent. On some days, you will write three paragraphs, stop, and do nothing else. But frequently writing down some brief thoughts will grow, and pollinate, and cascade into something much larger.  

Discipline is key. 

When an audience reads your essays or stories, they shouldn’t be able to identify whether you were in a good mood, or a bad mood. Consistent processes will generate consistent results. 

This is hard. 

Sometimes writing words onto paper is a painful, and mentally exhausting endeavor. During those times, the solution is to rely on discipline and mechanics, technically slogging through tears and blood, slime and mud.

Outlines are a useful tool, which provide extreme clarity.

Nobody enjoys writing an outline. It’s mechanical, boring work. A tedious chore. And when grandiose, operatic ideas are translated into bullet points, even the most exciting literary adventure can resemble a grocery list. Reading the Wikipedia page for Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Lolita, 1984, Watership Down, or Charlotte’s Web feels completely different than reading the novel itself. 

Plot summaries feel terrible, they lack flavor. 

One similar storytelling tool, which I demonstrate in-depth below, is something called a “beat sheet”. This is a document relied upon in television and film. There’s no standard format for a beat sheet, it’s an internal document shared among screenwriters. 

A “beat” is the smallest emotional instant that occurs during a scene. This includes actions, dialogue, exposition, camera angles and close-ups… anything that might be important. Story “beats” play the same role as musical notes during a song. Every beat serves a purpose. Each beat moves the story along in some way, or heightens emotion, or reveals significant information.

Outlines sketch the framework for an entire story.

Beat sheets are smaller, intended to choreograph individual scenes.

Obviously, creating a beat sheet involves a lot of time, energy, attention that could be spent writing the actual scene. I prefer to never use them. They are necessary for complex ensemble sequences, juggling intrigues and subversion. Especially long scenes, where chronological sequences alter the outcome of events. Or switching between subplots. If multiple characters are hiding secrets, it’s better to explicitly write down the truths and lies each character believes.

Ensemble novels are convoluted chessboards. They involve Bayesian games of incomplete information, which can quickly spiral into chaos. Remembering a discrete spectrum of misunderstandings, deceptions, and delusions can easily become confusing.

Information should remain siloed.

Most of the time, beat sheets are helpful for figuring out how to arrange content in a logically consistent fashion, and solving logistical, chronological problems during the early stages of writing.

It’s an important skill, which authors prefer to avoid, but knowing how to apply this tool will cure numerous headaches.

Similar to diagramming sentences, you want to know how to do it, and you don’t ever want to do it.

Below, I have presented a Beat Sheet of one of the most iconic scenes in the past decade of television: The Red Light, Green Light scene from the pilot episode of Squid Game, where hundreds of prisoners died in a race.

This is an extremely long scene, but it makes for a perfect example, featuring massive complexity. Normal beat sheets aren’t this complex, long, detailed, or difficult. Usually a 3-minute scene can be summarized in half a page, with 5-10 bullet points (each bullet point would be 1-3 sentences).

My challenge to you is a very simple, easy exercise.

After reading this, pick one of your favorite scenes in television or film. The scene should be less than three minutes. Write a short beat sheet: half a page, with 5-10 bullet points. This is intended to be a learning exercise, where you describe the scene’s smallest details. Consider watching the scene with the sound off. Consider pausing when the camera switches angles. Analyze the progression of information, escalation of conflict, and the emotions inspired in the audience.

Your notes should focus on these signals:

• 1.) Camera angles

• 2.) Emotional content

• 3.) Plot escalations, movements, progressions.

• 4.) Progression of exposition. 

• 5.) Physical actions

• 6.) Audio cues, sounds, music.

This writing exercise should only take you fifteen minutes, from start to finish. It’s not difficult. You have no excuse!

Squid Game Beat Sheet, Episode One.

(Pilot episode lasts for 55 minutes, 11 seconds)

This scene occupies the time:

42:30 — 55:00

Setting:

Prisoners shuffle outside into a sandy yard, while a mysterious and sinister puppet-master watches from a comfortable TV room. The villain is clothed in a black hood, and a polyhedral ceramic mask. On the far side of the yard, a gigantic toy doll dressed in an orange dress (either mango, or burnt orange) and a bright yellow shirt (cadmium yellow, or canary yellow) stares at the confused, tentative crowd. 

This is a long, detailed, 13-minute scene which provides the climax for the pilot episode. Numerous angles are involved. Action is strictly choreographed for a large ensemble. Emotions intensify, escalate, and recede multiple times. There’s a disorienting aesthetic which contrasts gruesome, blood-splattered brutality against the bright, childish pastels of a Saturday morning cartoon. 

Extreme, sudden violence combined with Korean children’s games provokes a sensation of absurdist dark comedy. 

This eccentric, idiosyncratic aesthetic contrast tapped into a lucrative market inefficiency, and made Squid Game a unique franchise. Squid Game rapidly became the most viewed show in Netflix’s history, with more than 1.6 billion hours viewed.

Events, listed beat by beat:

• Villain descends inside elevator.

• Gates open, prisoners slowly drift outside.

• Establishing shot — 3 doorways, 3 crowds spill together. 

• Awkward dialogue between main characters. Friendly idiot gambler greets embarrassed businessman. Both men are destitute failures, and the valedictorian salaryman is hiding his shame from oblivious childhood friend. 

• Camera cuts back to mysterious, hooded villain as he exits elevator, strolls down hallway. Stylistic shot, panning right to left, close-up on villain’s shoes, then cinematic image of full body.

• Villain answers phone, gives the order for the First Game to begin. 

• Villain sits down on sofa, watches television streaming live video of the prisoners, and he relaxes. 

• Cut to crowd, establishing shot.

• Zoom in, gates automatically swing closed behind the crowd of prisoners, who are starting to be afraid. Some of the smarter prisoners realize they are trapped.  

• Cut among crowd, who are processing dilemma. Camera pans up from the perspective of one of the prisoners, communicating that the walls of the enclosure rise straight up for a massive height, which cannot be climbed to escape.

• Dialogue between cocky, competitive teenage boys, who notice how creepy the gigantic toy doll is. For the first time, camera shows the far side of the wall is a huge distance, roughly the length of a football field. 

• Close up on toy doll, which stands like a scarecrow beneath a barren tree. She is flanked by a pair of hostile, masked guards. The walls behind her are screened by a scenic, serene matte painting of a wheat field with soft, blue skies (the shade is periwinkle blue, a muted and gentle color).

• Doll announces game, “Red Light, Green Light”, and her body swivels away. Rules are announced.

• Cut among crowd, show reactions. Cut to cocky, competitive teenage boys from the same high school, and they challenge each other to a friendly race, wagering a substantial amount of money.

• Doll announces a 5-minute time limit, and vague threat of “elimination”. 

• Race starts. 

• Close-up on clock, ticking down.

• Boys run ahead, Red Light declared, boys stop, but frontrunner sways to keep his balance, lightly moving.

• Zoom in on Doll’s red eyes. Player number announced eliminated.

• Sound of bullet, a sharp crack. Frontrunner falls, crumpled facedown. 

• Behind him, his friend laughs, expecting a hilarious, trivial prank. 

• Cut to villain puppet-master’s private room, where a close-up of his screen shows a gamified mosaic of Players with their faces and numbers. Dead player’s icon is pale-violet, then winks black.

• Cut to Doll, who swivels away, signaling Green Light.

• Friend shuffles forward to his dying friend, jokingly taunts friend. Doesn’t realize his friend was shot (yet).

• Dying friend spits up blood. The surviving teenage boy stops laughing, suddenly horrified.  

• Doll announces round ending.

• Cut to doll’s eyes, robotic interface pops up, displaying how the robot views the world. (James Cameron pioneered this technique in 1984 with The Terminator, presenting mathematical gamified screen. This is a HUD, a heads-up display.)

• Sniper rifle reticle points at horrified teenage boy, evaluating whether to kill him. His body is outlined by a green silhouette (this silhouette metric is used to plant a subtle clue, an Easter Egg of foreshadowing that only becomes obvious in retrospect).

• Target lock-on. Frightened boy turns, runs, and is shot from behind. 

• Cut, zoom in on nearby woman, blood-splattering across her face. She panics, touches her face, and screams. She immediately gets shot. 

• Crowd panics.

• Front half of the crowd races backward, colliding with others. Rest of the crowd remains frozen, and shocked. Robotic machine guns emerge from various aerial holes and start to pop-pop-pop exterminate the frantic, unraveling crowd. 

• Cut to stylistic close-up shots, showing individuals dying and falling in rapid succession. 

• Cut back to crowd. Panicked contestants reach the locked gates, start pounding the doors in animalistic desperation.

• Cut to robot doll, close-up of eyes darting about, seeking target priorities. 

• Corpses pile up at the back of the sandy arena, heaped around the locked gates. Rest of the crowd remains motionless, standing frozen in fear.

• Cut to puppet-master gamified screen of pale-violet icons, depicting prisoners with their faces and numbers. Icons are winking black in a rapid flurry. The musical sound is fun, like awarding coins in a video game, communicating a high score, and each death is announced one-by-one.

• Cut to stylistic close-up of the hooded villain’s coffee table. Key objects are displayed with beautiful golden lighting: a glass coaster with gold filigree, a large brandy container, a half-empty glass with chunks of ice piled in a tower. These objects show that the villain is enjoying the spectacle of gruesome, comedic deaths. But the most interesting object is the polyhedral mask: the puppet-master has removed his disguise, confident in his solitude. 

• He casually pours himself a brandy. Shots pop-pop-pop in the background. The sound of gunfire is muffled.

• Cut to wide-angle shot, showing the villain from behind his sofa. Only the back of his head is visible — a small, lean asian man with close-cropped hair.

• Cut to doll. Her eyes scan targets; blank dead bodies, safe green silhouettes, and a red, wounded body crawling away, who is immediately shot. “MOTION DETECTED” occupies her heads-up display (HUD).

• Here the emotion of the scene shifts. After the savage rush of violence, a fast and furious tempo, now the scene calms down. In a polite, unsettling voice, the happy toy doll once again announces the rules of the Red Light-Green Light contest, reminding the prisoners how to survive the widespread carnage. 

• Cut to, stylistic close-up of bloody corpse, which pans up to show a wide-angle shot of the terrified crowd.

• Cut to slow pan across stacked corpses, near the locked gates.

• Eerie music swells, producing soft tension.

• Cut to main character, a terrified idiot hyperventilating as he sits on the ground, trembling as he struggles to remain still, while his outstretched legs are trapped under the corpse of a bald, middle-aged man.

• Game resumes.

• Only one man walks forward — a smiling old man, who seems deliriously happy. (This is a subtle clue that is planted to foreshadow that he is secretly the main villain of the show, who is playing the game along with the rest of the contestants. It’s an excellent plot twist, that was also used in The Usual Suspects, and Sword Art Online.)

• Cut to doll’s eyes, scanning the crowd. Here, another clue is planted to foreshadow the final episode’s Big Reveal. All of the surviving prisoners are displayed with green silhouettes — except for the old man. (This occurs in less than two seconds, with rapid motion blur from a camera quickly panning across a crowd, so it’s impossible to catch outside of slow-motion.)

• Again, the old man moves forward while everyone else cowers in fear. He is demonstrating to the others how they can survive. 

• Now the entire crowd moves forward, and during this shot, the camera cuts to the puppet-master relaxing and casually drinking his brandy as he watches these gruesome deaths. One contestant wobbles off-balance, and is instantly shot. But the other prisoners are rapidly adapting to the game’s deadly rules.

• Cut to main hero, hyperventilating on the ground, trapped under a dead body. He is too terrified to move. (Here, the show is introducing a new source of dramatic conflict, after establishing and resolving the mass deaths of the unprepared crowd. Now, the newly-introduced dramatic question is: Will the hero stay on the ground and die, or overcome his fear and reach the far side of the wall before time runs out? Another lesson here is that any effective dramatic question needs to be phrased in terms of YES, or NO. Dramatic questions are always presented in binary terms. Often, the audience will be teased with a false dramatic conflict that outlines two potential outcomes, only for a third outcome to occur that invalidates both of the alternative denouements. But if a dramatic conflict is presented (during the initial set-up) with three options, as an author you should realize you are doing it wrong, and you have constructed your plot badly, with a stark lack of clarity. This is easy to correct after you identify the problem. It’s a common design flaw.)

• Main hero, frightened idiot, continues trembling on the ground. Others run forward. Some die. 

• Behind idiot gambler, the humiliated valedictorian from his childhood (they shared an awkward dialogue at the beginning of the scene) explains to the hero the rules of the game, potential tactics, and urges him to start moving before time runs out. 

  • He explains: 

  • 1.) Time is running out: Stand up!

  • 2.) The doll is a motion sensor.

  • 3.) Prisoners can hide behind other people’s bodies, to mask motion and survive.

• Shamed Valedictorian and friendly idiot gambler share a lingering glance. Valedictorian points, and camera cuts to the dwindling timer. 

• Note: At this point, the scene has shifted to a more cerebral, intellectual challenge. The initial horror and mayhem has emotionally exhausted the audience, and cannot be milked any further. Now the scene has become a puzzle game: will the friendly idiot outsmart the killer robot, now that his childhood friend is teaching him how to cheat? This marks the introduction of another dramatic question, self-contained during this scene. This is important because layering new emotions deepens the flavor of the audience’s vicarious experiences. 

• Hero comes to a moment of resolve, and the camera cuts away right as it implies he jumps up and starts running. But this angle is stylistic, the audience doesn’t actually see the hero leap to his feet — the information is communicated through audio sound of scraping gravel, and the motion blur of a camera panning before the angle is cut away.

• Cut to a wide-angle shot, stylistic groundfloor perspective of the entire crowd running.

• Cut to a new pair of characters: Greasy Yakuza criminal, and vixen thief apprentice. The young girl used to work for him. (Important note: Never write your characters as strangers. When you introduce two characters, they should always share a long previous history together — prior years of offscreen friendship, hatred, rivalry, or envy will heighten the drama of your stories in a big way.)

• Vixen thief is a young girl, hiding behind the greasy yazuka brawler. The gangster breathes hard, frightened, suddenly realizing that his longtime enemy is hiding behind him, and if he tries to turn around, the toy doll will immediately kill him.

• A new tension has been introduced, a new emotional angle — two criminals are trying to kill each other, hiding under the cover of mayhem. This carnage offers an opportunity to settle old scores. 

• (Note: Every emotional conflict you introduce is another burden for the author to lift and deliver, a promise to the readers that must be explored and fulfilled, another ball to be juggled until you choose to resolve the implicit narrative tensions. You are creating more work for yourself. But properly-executed emotional conflicts add texture, richness, depth to your storyline. Every masterpiece is beautiful, and meaningful on multiple levels.)

• Cut to hooded villain, happily drinking brandy alone in his room. 

• Cut to gangsters dialogue, as vixen thief attempts to murder her previous boss.

• Vixen grabs her enemy by his greasy hair, throws him to the ground, and runs forward, abandoning him to (hopefully) die. (This plants a seed, a question with the audience — what happened between these two criminals years ago, to inspire such hatred?)

• (Recap. There have been 3 pairs of prisoners who knew each other before the Squid Game randomly reunited them.

  • 1.) Shamed valedictorian businessman, and friendly idiot gambler.

  • 2.) High school teenage boys.

  • 3.) Greasy yakuza thug, and vixen thief. (Vixen thief robbed friendly idiot gambler at the beginning of the pilot episode, before the Squid Game, which is another, fourth example of how prior, offscreen personal history can escalate dramatic tension. Put simply, killing a stranger can never be as emotional as murdering an old friend.)

• Cut to stylistic shot. Bold reveal. Random stranger dies, and topples sideways, which reveals the main character (friendly idiot gambler) cowering, hiding behind him. It’s a very cool way to efficiently segue between the ensemble of characters.

• Next shot, friendly idiot gambler tries to run forward. But he is stopped in place. He turns around, with a mixture of surprise, dismay, and horror. A wounded, dying man is desperately clutching onto his leg, begging for help, preventing the main character from surviving. (This is an excellent insertion of a complication, which heightens tension. In storytelling terms: you introduce a problem, the hero fails, the hero struggles and improves, then the hero solves the problem. Those four steps provide the basic rhythm for dramatic conflict, stripped to its most basic level. But to play with the tempo and duration of a dramatic conflict, you can add unexpected complications, to stretch out the dramatic loop.)

  • Dramatic pattern, which is the basic loop of scenes. Infinite loops can be layered, entangled, rearranged into more complex patterns:

  • 1.) Problem introduced.

  • 2.) Hero fails. Suffers consequences.

  • 3.) Hero struggles, and fails again. But slight improvement creates hope, or spurs inspiration for a creative solution.

  • 4.) Hero wins.

  • 5.) Optional — we can restart the loop, by introducing a new problem, which is called a “dramatic complication”. The new problem is related to the original conflict, which creates a feeling of narrative symmetry. The audience feels a sense of harmony, because the dramatic complication seems to logically arise from the original unsolved conflict.

• (Note: One example of a popular dramatic loop is the formulaic structure of a murder mystery. Cynical police detective finds corpse (step one), he pursues a series of dead ends (step two), he pursues another red herring which somehow stumbles across an important clue (step three), and then he figures out the mystery (step four). This quest structure can be spread out into a massive journey used by video games, where the MAIN QUEST must be solved by completing dozens of smaller, easier quests and puzzles that unlock various prerequisites.)

• (Note: This next image is beautiful because of the use of Negative Space. The actors are probably standing ten feet from the camera, which creates an abnormally large amount of empty sand at the bottom of the screen. Probably 20-30% of the screen is blank sand, and another 20-30% of the screen is blue sky. Together, only a third of the screen is being used — that’s why this image feels visually neat, and aesthetically pleasing, and doesn’t feel crowded despite the presence of hundreds of actors, extras, and stuntmen.)

• The idiot gambler escapes, and behind him, the begging, wounded prisoner is shot. This is a key character moment which reinforces that the main character is a low-status, cowardly loser (which plants the seed for his character arc, for him to develop bravery later on. Every underdog needs a pathetic flaw. If there was no character flaw, there would be no story, and the climax wouldn’t function in dramatic terms. In a horror story, the climax destroys the hero by attacking his unsolved character flaw. In a traditional hero’s journey, the hero solves his character flaw at the exact moment when he overcomes the crisis.)

• Cut to villain in his private room, close-up of remote control. He presses button. Silky, smooth jazz music begins to play.

• In a moment of absurdity, the camera pans down to a miniature band of plastic toys that are mechanically moving, simulating the act of playing their instruments. (Note: This persistent, comedic, black comedy that seems out of place is the “secret sauce” which gives Squid Game its identity as a creative franchise. We could say that in musical terms, Squid Game is defined by dissonance, an intentional, purposeful commitment to strive for ugly choices and an unsettling, off-putting aesthetic.)

• (In one sentence: Squid Game combines horror with comedy.)

• The camera shows the villain’s face, blurred out of focus in the background (use of photographic “bokeh” effect), while the toy musicians play in the foreground. Camera angle teases audience with the mystery identity of the puppet-master. 

• A woman, soprano, is gently and softly singing an English cover of Frank Sinatra’s 1964 “Fly Me to the Moon”. (Note: There’s an absurdity to this music playing while prisoners are dying gruesomely, and again, the music illustrates that the sinister puppet-master is relaxed. But more importantly, the audience is exhausted after ten minutes of extreme gore and mayhem. Soft, gentle, and beautiful music voiced by a woman is quite calming, changes the scene’s mood, and allows the audience to relax. At this point, the audience starts to feel confident the main hero will survive and reach the other side.)

• Cut to toy redhead woman, a singer mouthing along to the music. 

• Cut back to television screen, aerial wide angle lens from the perspective of the hooded villain. Red Light, Green Light has become a dance. All of the survivors know how to play the game, and they are running and freezing in rhythm. Their frantic advances resemble a synchronized dance performance, especially as the camera remains at a distance. 

• Cut to timer, counting down to 59 remaining seconds.

• Cut to gigantic doll swiveling, hunting for targets. 

• Slow-motion shot of dead body lying prone, head tilted towards camera, directionless eyes looking out from a pool of blood. This is a beautifully stylistic shot, showing only the legs of the survivors running past the abandoned corpse. 

• Song swells, still gentle. Camera takes a wide-angle shot from behind the crowd as they sprint forwards, toward safety. They are moving in slow-motion, and land with performative, twisting flourishes. Nearby, one man’s skull explodes in a burst of gore as a bullet rips through his face. It’s shocking to see the blood erupt.

• Cut to wide-angle, diagonal, aerial angle of the crowd from in front. Prisoners are running in slow-motion.

• Cut to old man, smiling and leaping with his legs outstretched wide. He seems bizarrely happy (another sign foreshadowing to the end of the series). The old man’s jersey is marked with the numerals “001”, which in retrospect is quite a significant clue. 

• Rapid cut to four deaths, slow-motion. All deaths are hit in the chest, and thrown into ballet-style flourishes as they die. The first two victims are shown from 2 angles each. Then the next two victims are shown only once, from one angle. (Note: This is a visual pattern, quickly established and broken, to disrupt the audience’s tempo and keep them off-balance, wondering what will happen next. The plot events and camera work remain unpredictable for the duration of this iconic scene.)

• Happy music. Vocals end, pure instrumental. Slow-motion running, camera cuts around the ensemble and shows close-ups of all the major characters. Scene feels happy, and very safe, like all of the important characters are guaranteed to survive. Feels like all major deaths and surprises have passed. 

• Cut to doll.

• Cut to three deaths, slow-motion, presented one-by-one.

• Cut to pale-violet game screen, showing player icons winking black one-by-one.

• Cut to wide angle, close-up on vixen thief and greasy yakuza thug behind her; both running in slow-motion.

• Cut to broad, wide-angle lens from ground floor, pointing upward to encompass nearly all important subjects: two guards dressed in pink, flanking a gigantic toy doll standing near a barren tree, with green-clad survivors running to safety, and tall blue walls of matte paintings rising high in the background. This is an underappreciated camera angle, it’s a little ugly, but it delivers an incredible mise-en-scene. (Note: this camera angle functions to remind the real-world audience there are 2 hostile, pink, masked guards standing besides the toy doll. Both guards have been offscreen for the majority of the scene.). 

• Cut to pink line, the exuberance and relief of survivors leaping across the finish line. Old man displays a huge grin. 

• Cut to pale-violet game board, showing more deaths.

• Cut to timer: 23 seconds.

• Cut to slow-motion runs, leaps to safety. Valedictorian crosses line. Friendly idiot gambler is lagging near the back. 

• Doll forces crowd to freeze. Music continues playing as before, gentle female soprano.

• Cut to valedictorian panting, fear in his eyes — you can see him realizing that the main character, the idiot gambler is in danger of running out of time before he can reach safety.

• Close-up of idiot gambler, fatigued. 

• Camera intercuts between close-ups of the valedictorian and the gambler. Camera cuts to gigantic doll, swiveling. Then gambler leaps forward — suddenly the camera cuts to his foot, slipping on a corpse’s outstretched arm. Cut to idiot gambler falling forward as the doll cues Red Light, his expression communicates the realization he is about to die right before crossing the finish line.

• Music stops. Idiot gambler stops, mid-fall. Camera shows a close-up of his terrified face.

• Cut to close-up of brown, unknown fist holding the main character up from the back of his shirt. 

• Camera shows Indian stranger holding up gambler, saving his life. In the background, someone else is shot and dies.

  (Technically, when you look at the image below, you can see that the shot has been reframed and restaged. In the previous shot, the hero’s right foot stepped on a dead body. then slipped forward and twisted right. But in this angle, the hero is standing four feet forward, to the left of the dead body — his foot is not anywhere close to the corpse that supposedly tripped him. I approve of this image; it’s beautiful, superior cinematography, which nobody in a normal audience will ever realize was restaged. One lesson here is that the audience won’t notice physical inconsistencies, as long as the visual progression remains beautiful, logical, and meaningful.)

• Camera switches between panting gambler, panting Indian stranger who is still holding him upright to keep him alive.

• Music resumes; and in slow-motion, the remaining survivors run for their lives during the game’s final seconds. 

• Cut to timer, at 3 seconds, which slowly ticks down to zero.

• The gambler and his new Indian friend leap across the goal line, in slow-motion, accompanied by a triumphant, sleek jazz instrumental (trumpets). 

• Time expires; the remaining Squid Game prisoners stand frozen, hoping for mercy. They are quickly exterminated.

  

End Scene