The standard format calls for the font Courier in 12 points. A page of writing in the proper format will equal about a minute of screen time, so for a 90-minute film, your script should be around 90 pages long.
It is very important that every time you name a place or set, you always use the same name to let everyone know that it is, in fact, the same location. In this example, the location is “Paul’s house”, if I was to write “Paul’s summer house” later on in the script, it will look as if these were two separate locations, so be careful!
It’s also worth mentioning that the same applies to the time of day, make sure that day is always day and night is always night instead of using words like “morning” or “evening” which might be confusing.
It’s also worth mentioning that the same applies to the time of day, make sure that day is always day and night is always night instead of using words like “morning” or “evening” which might be confusing. The heading is also where we number the scenes, you can put the scene number at the end of the heading or the beginning. (INT. PAUL’S HOUSE - DAY 1)
3. Action
The action is what happens in the scene and it’s written in the present tense, in continued text. Be descriptive and call things by their name, use adjectives and avoid long paragraphs. Should look like this:
The life and soul of your script. Characters need to be written in capital letters the first time they appear in an action paragraph, with a brief description between parenthesis. In this description, we need to summarize the most important details of the character, both physically and personality-wise along with their age.
Outside of action paragraphs and before dialogue, characters are written in the center of the page, in uppercase letters, and with no other description.
5. Dialogue
Dialogue is written right below the name of the character that says it, also centered on the page.
When writing dialogue, think about your characters as different people with their own personalities and way of speaking, not everyone speaks the same way or uses the same words. There are people who are less direct and some that are straight forward and their dialogue needs to reflect it. Also, prefer subtext and reading between the lines, instead of descriptive and obvious dialogue. In this article, I give you some tips on writing dialogue and developing characters.
Like camera angles and music, transitions are usually part of the director’s input rather than the writer, however, some are allowed and sometimes necessary when we have a particular vision.
Transitions are aligned to the right, written in capital letters.
Now that we’ve seen all parts of the script separately, let’s take a look at what the whole thing should look like.
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