Every screenwriting book out there (and there are HUNDREDS) will tell you to start your screenplay with a bang to get the audience hooked. Within the first few pages, they all say, a car should explode, your hero should get dumped, your heroine should lose her job, or aliens should invade.
Unfortunately, in this blog, I’m bucking all their good advice and starting with the boring stuff first. I hope you’ll stick with me anyway.
So the most boring part of writing a screenplay is getting it into the right format, but it’s also one of the most important aspects of writing one. You will probably find parts of formatting utterly pointless (I know I did when I first learned it), but it’s all there for a reason. First of all, if you stick to the formatting you’ll find that a page will equal about a minute of finished film—which makes it easy to estimate running time and cost. Secondly, you’ll provide all the needed information to the people who will help make your film: It’ll tell the sound department which sounds they need to record, the casting director which parts to cast, and the locations team which sets they need to build or locations they need to get out in the real world. So I know there are a lot of fiddly things to remember about formatting but they’re all there for a reason and pretty important.
To help you out, I’m linking you to a pdf of a sample script. It’s one written by the screenwriting professors at UBC and not only gives you a template to follow, but the characters in the screenplay talk about all the fiddly little formatting things you’ll need to be aware of: Your margins, where your tabs should be, what bits need to be in all caps, and how to use parentheticals (also sometimes known as wrylies). NOTE: Please ignore the scene about William Goldman and action scenes, as I find this confuses more people than it helps.
If you want this info in point form, rather than a narrative, there’s the ScriptFrenzy formatting site. There are also, like I stated before, hundreds and hundreds of books on screenwriting. Unfortunately, they’re pretty expensive for the most part, but, on the upside, most libraries usually have a half-dozen or so, and they all pretty much say the same thing. My favorite is the Screenwriter’s Bible because it has an expanded formatting section and manages to cover even the most obscure formatting question, and is also pretty cheap for a screenwriting book. The internet can be pretty helpful as well, (although it’s best to get a second opinion on the internet– don’t just believe the first link) so don’t be afraid to Google, or you can always e-mail me!
If you prefer to learn by example, try reading other people’s screenplays to not only get a good idea of format, but also writing style. There are a lot of screenplays available to read online. Screenplays-Online, SimplyScripts and Drew’s Script-O-Rama (irritating pop up ads can show up at Drew’s, though) are good places to start. Or you can simply Google the name of your favorite movie and the word screenplay and you might find it posted somewhere. Be aware though, that some of your favorite movies were written as exceptions to the rules: Their idea was so amazing, or they’re so famous, (or they were BFFs with the right exec or something) that the script was produced despite its terrible formatting and/or grammatical errors. Charlie Kaufman is awesome, for instance, but he’s not exactly your average screenwriter. William Goldman can get away with writing action sequences like he does because he’s William Goldman– Joe Screenwriter might have a lot more trouble convincing people that random capitalized fragments in the middle of his scene are okay.
After about five minutes of trying to type up a script in Word, you’re probably hating life, right? Setting all those margins and hitting the right number of tabs and remembering to turn your caps lock on and off at the right time is kind of a pain. Fortunately, some kind-hearted computer programmers have decided to help us out and there’s software that will take care of all those things for you.
Final Draft is probably the most famous screenwriting software. I quite like Screenwriter, which is another competing program. However, either will set you back a couple hundred bucks, which is an awful lot for a glorified word processor. Your best bang for your buck is Celtx. Celtx is a great little screenwriting program, and it’s absolutely free! It can be a little buggy from time to time (for some reason it seems to print out the page numbers in the wrong font), which is why it’s important to be familiar with proper formatting so you can catch the software when it lies to you (and even Final Draft does at times). Celtx does have a pretty good message board to report bugs and look for technical help, if you’re stumped.
-Sarah
Questions, Comments, Concerns? Leave me a comment or send me an e-mail at scrauder (at) interchange.ubc.ca.
