How to attack your scene transitions.
Nearly every screenplay has 100+ transitions from one scene to another. This can be a major area of stress with the reader. Don't let it be.
Action Lines
How to write a montage.
Don't let proper montage format sabotage your montage.
Do professional screenwriters get to play by different rules?
Do professional writers operate under different rules?
No. They do not.
Can they get away with more aggressive formatting?
Yes, they can.
But not because of rules.
How to cut 8 pages from any screenplay right now.
One of your primary tasks early in a script is to convince the reader that they are in excellent hands with you as their storyteller. The page count is the first evidence you submit to persuade them.
5 simple ways to improve your action lines immediately.
You can take a giant leap in the readability of your action lines just by paying more attention to them. It's about committing to care about the little things.
It's The Intention That Matters
We ask ourselves: what is the emotion we want to evoke? What information do we want to impart, or what visual do we want to reveal?
Put simply, what is the intention?
It's your movie. Put the reader in the audience
If we can get the reader to see the images and feel the emotions, we can transmit our enthusiasm and excitement for the project to them.
Make Your Screenplay More Readable: Write Vertically
Put simply, writing vertically refers to making choices that push the reader's eyes DOWN the page more often than they go ACROSS the page.
Use It Or Lose It.
I want to discuss little visual actions we didn't intend to be emotional, but could. These tend to be discoveries and can be a lot of fun. In these cases, it's not whether the line of action takes up too much space, but whether it takes up ENOUGH space to really work, and therefore be worth keeping.
The Humble CUT TO:
The goal of the screenplay is to evoke the emotional experience of seeing the movie.
Anything that gets in the way of that, I avoid. I want the reader to envision the film and react emotionally rather than engage with the script as some technical document.
When to describe the character in detail
This week I want to talk about when to describe a character you just introduced. How we describe them is an excellent topic, too, but well covered by others. I’ll save my take on it for another time. Today is about WHEN.
How To Evoke A Shot List In Your Screenwriting
Many people repeat, "Don't direct your screenplay," when they should just be saying, "Don't use camera angles." But you should be directing on the page.