Spent basically the entire day inside the screenplay. The big thread was Matsana — I’d had her sitting at the edges of the story, and today I found the scene that actually needed her: the one about the letter. Once that clicked, a lot of other things started falling into place, and I kept pulling on that thread with Claude’s help through several more passes.
The bigger structural work – again, with Claude’s help – was replacing montages with fleshed-out scenes. I had written in very vague chunks of the story – a character goes to find help – with virtually no detail or dialogue. I had Claude flesh out the story beats and then went back in and adjusted.
Smaller stuff along the way: clarified that the slates the characters write on are chalkboards (not something more exotic), worked out the emergency airlock beat, fixed some causality issues that had crept in, and cleaned up headers that had gotten sloppy. Also spent a chunk of time on notes about geography and pacing, trying to keep the audience oriented even when the setting is this alien. Ended the day asking Claude what improvements Stephen Spielberg would suggest (WWSBD?). The virtual Spielberg suggested a “cold open” idea I want to come back to.