Often I've been asked how I got started writing screenplays. Well, the first thing I did when I made that decission was to read screenplays, lot's of screenplays and several books on screenplay writing and then I started writing. Naturally hitting and bumping into walls, but kept going. In time when I was pretty confident I would have a few actor friends read them (I started writng short screenplays), to get feed back. Years later I still find myself learning, challenging my self in working on a style that works best for me.
Screenwritng for me, was a self taught lesson, through trial and error, never took a workshop or went to school for this. I've never been one to sit in a class room, I've always been more of a hands on kind of person. Life has been my best teacher. Oh, and my passion for film.
Cinematic writing is an exercise in minimalism. This is because cinema is a visual medium. The pictures tell the story. There’s no opportunity to describe what is happening inside a character’s head like there is in a novel, so it’s important that we are able to show the audience what is happening.
Film also doesn’t allow the luxury of long conversations that are frequently found in novels. The dialogue must be crisp and straight forward. If your dialogue extends for pages and pages with no action, than your film is too static and needs more action. Action doesn’t necessarily mean car chases or explosions. Action can be picking up a pen and playing with it suggestively. It could be an instruction for the actor to change facial expression, stand, sit or pace back and forth. These things are tools with which to tell your story and are just as important as dialogue. A correctly laid out page of film script equates to about a minute of screen time, so the number of pages you need to write is the same as the number of minutes in a movie. Most feature films are 90 to 120 minutes long, so a script of 90 to 120 pages is the right length. Commercial, successful films follow a formatted formula. Most audience members in a cinema won’t be aware of the screenplay structure, of Act I, Act II and Act III.
My favorite books for screenwriters that have worked for me are two, HOW TO WRITE A MOVIE IN 21 DAYS by VIKI KING and THE K.I.S.A.S.S. GUIDE TO SCREENWRITNG by J.T. O'NEAL.
Two very simple books to help you write simple screenplays.
I've read numerous books on screenplay writing, and these two books are the only two that have made a connection with me, held my attention and guilded me with writing exericise and to aviod me from getting in my way with the many excuses for not writing. Viki's method for systematically forcing a script to come out of you in just 3 weeks was totally challenging.
I still sit with these two books everytime I write. I've produced a series of short screenplays, two feature screenplays, working on my third feature script now and I have written numberous treatments to develope into feature screenplays. So in the end getting 120 pages written in any form is an achievement!. You can read other books about plot, theory and character development, But I would say try these two books first and get that screenplay out of your head and onto the pages.
FIRST FIND YOUR NICHE
GENRE = TYPE OF STORY ...
DRAMA ... THRILLER ... ACTION ... HORROR ... FANTASY ... COMEDY ... MUSICAL ...
... SCREENPLAY = WRITTEN DESCRIPTION OF MOVING PICTURES ... MOVIES = MOVING PICTURES ...
SCREENWRITING = RE-WRITNG
... RE-READ SCRIPT AND RE-WRITE IT. FOCUS ON ...
SPELLING ... FORMAT ... PLOT ... CHARACTERS ... CONTRAST ... DIALOGUE ... THEME ... AND SIMPLIFICATION ...
THE FOUR BASIC PARTS OF A SCREENPLAY THAT GUIDE US ...
PLACE / ACTION / CHARACTER / DIALOGUE ...
... MAKE YOUR OWN MOVIE ...
A GREAT WAY TO LEARN HOW TO WRITE SCREEPLAYS IS TO
MAKE A MOVIE ...
... A FIVE PAGE SHORT SCRIPT = FIVE MINUTES ...
A TEN PAGE SHORT SCRIPT = TEN MINUTES ...
Any kind of script has to be correctly formatted. One softwear available in the market ... is Final Draft which serve at the professional end of the market.
Final Draft for script writing. It doesn't get any better than this. There are templates for screenplays, stage writing and television sitcoms, with features like the ability to create PDFs of your scripts and a useful facility for reading the script aloud using different computer-generated voices for the various characters. You can even produce reports that show the dialogue spoken by just one character, which is handy for checking the frequency of catchphrases and consistency in dialogue.
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