Photo by thorinside

There’s the usual you hear about screenplays, formatting, structure, turning points ect. Not that those aren’t important, but sometimes you have to take a step back and make sure your story serves more than just the skeleton of the plot. Here’s some points you want to make sure you keep in mind as you go through the writing process. The very first point is also the most important: Have fun writing!

Getting an Idea

Both the easiest and hardest thing to do is finding that nugget of an idea for your story. It’s not even something that can be taught, but it is something you can teach your own brain!

Write
Simply, just start writing! It doesn’t matter what you write just start writing. Maybe it’s something you noticed today, maybe it’s just you rambling on about nothing. A great thing to starting writing about is something that makes you angry, that’ll usually get you passionate, confrontational and fired up on all cylinders. A good story has passion and conflict, so it’s a great place to start.

Brainstorm
I’m a fan of mind-mapping. I usually use it as a way of breaking down an idea into smaller components. In the case of a plot, you can take, lets say the historical case of the Titanic and break that off into romantic, tragic, hubris and class-struggle. You can then branch those off into sub-categories (eg. romantic -> romeo & juliet, fairytale love story, etc.) My favorite free mindmapping tool is Bubbl.us if you’re interested in checking that out. Another great one is FreeMind.

Another way of using mindmaps is to flesh out your characters in the same way. For example, Bob is cold, an alcoholic and a womanizer. Womanizer -> his mom left when he was young after squandering all his father’s savings, sees women as using and manipulative. Alcoholic -> his father became an alcoholic when Bob’s mom left, like father like son.

Starting

A few writers can just sit down and off they go. Most can’t and that’s why the 3 act structure is so popular, it gives you a throughline to string your entire story on. But before you go outlining start with this:

Write a Logline
If you can’t explain what your story is about in one line, don’t outline yet. Without a logline, your story can go off the rails, it’s a great device to keep you on track.

Outline in Color
Here’s a great tip for when you’re outlining, color code it. Each color represents a different aspect of your script, either action, love, exposition and comic relief. If there’s a big block of any one of the colors, the script is off balance.

Dialog

Good dialog is hard to write. The key thing to keep in mind is that what the characters are talking about aren’t what they’re talking about. Confused? Don’t worry, here’s a selection of tips to help you!

Natural and Unforced
If your characters speak like they’re out of the Star Wars prequels, WARNING! Real people use contractions and skip words all together. Replace cannot with can’t and do not with don’t. You don’t have to do this everytime, but it’s a great rule of thumb. Another one is to try and remove as many words from the beginning of every line as possible so, for example, Joel: “He could have killed him”, Rebecca: “It’s not in his nature” becomes Joel: “Could’ve killed him”, Rebecca: “Not in his nature”.

Streamline your Dialog
The best dialog is no dialog. Two people locking eyes on each other says way more than “I love you”, but your characters are going to need to say something at some point in time in the film. The trick is to get them to say the least amount possible. If you need to have a character explain something, try to break it up by another character interupting or having it happen during an action scene.

What Dialog Does
Dialog has 4 functions: Firstly, it reveals character. Who does he like or dislike, what his upbringing is, etc. Secondly, it helps advance the plot through explanations or decisions. Thirdly, characters use it to explain the past and fourth, it’s used to articulate feelings that can’t be visually conveyed. If your dialog doesn’t fit into at least one of these catagories, cut it! It doesn’t serve the story!

Subtext
Now that we’ve gone through all that, remember, the best dialog does all of the above in the subtext. What a character says and what they imply are two different things. Example time! Lets say Jane is interested in Cody but doesn’t know if he’s seeing anyone, the one thing she won’t do is ask him outright. Real dialog beats around the bush generally and in this example she may ask him where he lives and he responds with downtown. She’ll ask him if it’s expensive and he’ll respond with yes, but he splits it with his roommate Joe. While it’s not definitive, she at least knows that he doesn’t live with a girlfriend and may still be available. A bit more prodding around and she may discover he is in fact single. This also falls under the “if your characters speak like they’re out of the Star Wars prequels, WARNING!” rule.

Action Slugs

Action slugs, the name says it all! Action! This is where you tell the reader what happens next.

Action Happens
If there’s one rule I want everyone to learn, it’s that whatever is happening on the page, it’s happening now and it’s immediate. Don’t speak in a passive voice or in the past-tense, it happens now! BOOOM! Don’t be afraid to add in a BOOOM! CRASH! or SMASH!

Properly Formatted
I could write a thousand pages of how to properly format a script, but as I’m already a thousand words into this post I’ll keep it a little bit simpler: get Celtx or Final Draft. This is a start as there’s a whole bunch of details into writing a script, but getting software will help dramatically to begin with.

Streamline your Action Slugs
Just like your dialog, you want to remove as much superfluous wording as possible. The more you explain, the more you’re likely to confuse your reader and really, no one reads a giant paragraph of text. Less is always more when screenwriting!

No Camera Direction
You’re job isn’t to place the camera and director’s hate seeing “George sits down at the desk and takes out a pen. ECU: pen writing on paper as he signs his name”. First of all, that’s the director’s job and secondly, you’re writing in a passive voice which is boring! The good news is that you can still imply an ECU: pen writing on paper by placing spaces inbetween the slug lines. This creates more whitespace (which readers love) and tells the director what you had in mind.

George sits down at the desk. He picks up a pen.

The pen hits the paper and his signature pours out on to it.

Now, I didn’t say there was an extreme close up in this example, but you can see how I implied it.

Re-writing

Remember, great scripts aren’t written, they’re rewritten!

Cut, Cut and then Cut Some More!
Cutting out all the crap, plot threads you dropped and bad dialog are easy. The hard part comes when you cut out your favorite lines and scenes because they don’t serve the story. This is really hard but remember, if it doesn’t serve the story then it shouldn’t be in there. You can always save that scene for another script so at least keep it handy!

Making the Dialog More Natural
One of my favorite techniques is to go through the script, scene by scene, and read the dialog into an audio recorder. Then I’ll go through it again except this time I’ll paraphrase all the lines with whatever comes to mind. Lastly, I’ll take notes as to what needs to be said in the scene and I’ll improv the whole scene. From those 3 recordings I’ll pick and choose the best lines. As weird as this sounds, I’ll also create different accents or dialects for the characters, this helps me create unique voices for each character.

It’s All About the Story

To wrap it all up, remember everything you do in a screenplay must serve the story. Each moment must simultaneously forward the plot, character and theme as well as make the audience want to know what comes next. The final bit of advice I can give you is to read as many great screenplays as you possibly can and write until your finger tips fall off!

Have any great tips? Leave them in the comments!

Every story has a moral premise, it’s the beating heart of the story.  While the physical journey of the protagonist is what happens to the character, the moral premise is about what happens on the character’s inner journey.  Here’s a quick way of figuring out the moral premise of your story.

The 4 M’s

It takes 4 “M’s” to work out the moral premise, they are Morality, Malignance, Maturation and Misfortune.  The first two are the choices the protagonist has to choose between.  Morality being a good or just choice while malignance being the bad or injust choice.  Usually the protagonist chooses the good choice but not always, as Michael in The Godfather, for example, chooses the malignant path.  This of course leads to the other 2 “M’s”, Maturation and Misfortune, these are the effects of the choice.

Putting it Together

So now we have the choice the protagonist has made, if the protagonist chooses Morality it will lead his character to maturation and he will grow and be a better person.  If he follows the malignant path, it will lead him to misfortune.  Back to the Godfather, Michael chooses the malignant path and becomes the next Don by the end of the film, the very thing he did not want at the beginning of the film.

While this is a great resource for writers, it works equally as well for directors interpreting the script. Sometimes the director sees something else in the script other than what the writer intended. So, there you have it, your moral premise in an easy to put together nutshell.

Surprisingly, I find that there’s not much information on breaking down a script.  This is one of those skills that is a must if you want to direct or produce.  Here’s the way that I do it as of today although I’m always looking for ways to streamline the breakdown.  The image above comes from the last thing I directed which is a pilot for a webseries which you can use a reference.

50% Photocopy

First, make sure your script is not double sided.  The right hand of the page should have the script while the left hand should be empty.  What you need to do now is photocopy the page on the right hand side onto the lefthand side 50% smaller, it should only take up a quarter the page.  This will allow you to take notes and create sketches.

Line the Script

Next, take a ruler and pencil and draw a line between every scene.  You might find yourself creating new scenes because a character walks from one room to another or for some other reason.  If you look at the script page above, you’ll notice that the very first scene is a montage for the “opening credits” and then goes on for 16 scenes.  While not broken down in the script scene by scene, when you line it you know exactly how many scenes are there.

Page Count

Now you have to assign page counts to each scene.  To do this, each page must be broken down into 1/8ths excluding the top and bottom margins. My favorite way of going about this is to create a template on a letter sized page. You could eyeball it using the hole punches as the top and bottom holes generally line up with the top and bottom margins. So in between the holes is 1/4 of a page (or 2/8′s of a page, as filmmakers seem to love eighths) and in between that is 1/8 of a page.

Coloring Coding

This is where your script starts to get a bit more color in it’s cheeks. So to speak. For every scene slugline you’ll want to differentiate between interior, exterior, daylight and nighttime. Here’s the color scheme I use:

• INT. DAY = Highlight Yellow
• INT. NIGHT = Highlight Pink
• EXT. DAY = White (no highlight)
• EXT. NIGHT = Highlight Purple
• DAWN/DUSK = Highlight Orange.

After that, you’ll want to color code your characters, SFX, props, costume, etc.  I usually run out highlighter colors after coloring characters and props so I move onto underlining using different marker colors.  Again, here’s what I use:

• Characters = Underline Red
• Props = Underline Purple
• Stunts = Underline Orange
• Vehicle/Animals = Underline Blue
• Special Equipment = Draw a box
• Extras = Highlight Green
• Wardrobe = Circle
• Special Effects = Highlight Blue
• Make-up/Hair = Mark with an asterisk
• Sound Effects/Music = Underline in brown

If the project is short enough, I’ll change up the colors to just highlighters as the script probably won’t contain most of these categories in it.

Breaking Down the Shots

On the left hand page, with your %50 reduced script, you can now start breaking down the script into shots. To do this, you draw a line vertically down the page and letter it. For instance, in scene 2, your master shot will be a vertical line for the entire scene and labelled “A”. In the space around the reduced script, I note that 2A is “FS – Master shot”, FS meaning “full shot”. Then you draw vertical lines where you want those specific shots you have in your head and this gives you an easy visual reference of where the holes in your coverage are.

So now that you’re done your script should look something like this:

And there you are, one systematically broken down script!  How do you break down your scripts, let us know in the comments!

Image by Mondi

So sometimes you can’t see the forest for the trees as a director.  Your focused on a million different things that you start to forget the simple basic things… or at least I do.  Here’s a list of the 8 “obvious” things I think a director should know:

1. It’s the actor’s job to act.  Probably the most obvious on the list, but I keep catching myself telling the actor what to feel or how to say lines.  The actor was cast to fill that specific role and they know how the character should feel or how they should say it.  Your job is to make sure it works in context with the rest of the film
2. You’re the least useful person on set.  This is a joke I usually tell people.  As a director, I want to understand every part of production and surround myself who know way more about it than I.  I want to talk to the DoP about lenses and know what I’m talking about but they should know more about it than I.  The director literally talks a film into creation, he doesn’t “do” any of the actual work.  Trust your crew, they’re smarter than you in their various fields.
3. Your director’s vision should be blurry.  You’ve heard of the director’s vision for a movie.  The reality is that you never ever get what you originally pictured and oftentimes that’s awesome!  Sometimes your DoP has a great lighting or camera angle you didn’t think of, sometimes an actor will ad lib a line and it just works.  Don’t be a slave to your vision, allow room to explore and change.  More importantly, allow room for your cast and crew to explore!
4. You will make mistakes, cover your ass.  Roger Corman has a great strategy called a master and two pops.  Basically he tries to get a master shot and two close ups for every scene.  While this works it can end up being boring but the premise is absolutely sound.  Shoot a master, then shoot a couple of cutaways which could be artwork on the wall, a cat at a window and some reaction shots.
5. Work on automatic.  I work fast on set because I don’t have to think.  I plan everything in pre-production, review what I’m doing that day in the morning and then turn my brain off and follow my notes without too much thought about where I am in the story.  This frees me up to change stuff on the fly and be more flexible.  The director’s binder I mentioned in this post is absolutely necessary to this step!
6. Capture emotion, not images.  This is one of those traps I get into all the time!  I’m always looking out for the most interesting shot, but sometimes that’s the wrong shot emotionally.  Always remember that the blocking and framing need to tell the emotion of the story, the kewl shots are secondary.
7. Set the tone on set.  You’re the captain of this ship and if you’re in a bad mood, the set is in a bad mood.  It doesn’t matter how bad the shoot may be going, everyone looks up to you for guidance.  If you march forward like you relish this challenge, chances are everyone will follow and try to make this the best damn film possible!
8. What the story is isn’t as important as how you tell it. The story may be something you think is important to tell but you can’t just blurt it out.  How a film tells the story is the number one thing a director must look at from which all other decisions are made, even more so then what the story is about.

What do you think are some other “obvious” things a director should know?

Image: Fernanda B. Viégas, Martin Wattenberg, and Kate Hollenbach

Like many other artists, I have a need to create something. Specifically in my case I like to tell stories, the media I use it sometimes secondary. I like to use different media for different kinds of stories but I started thinking why is there this drive? I could be doing something like curing cancer or bringing about world peace instead of making a film.

So why is it so important to for me to tell these stories? I gave it a ton of thought and came to the conclusion that as storytellers, we occupy an interesting niche especially when seen in hindsight. History tells us what we did, stories tell us who we were.

I was reminded by this in a tweet Ted Hope put out yesterday asking why we make movies and again this morning when I came across an article about the artwork you see up there from Wired. There was a great quote in it that I wanted to share from it:

The information contained in literature, or even email, encodes our identity as human beings. The entire literary canon may be smaller than what comes out of particle accelerators or models of the human brain, but the meaning coded into words can’t be measured in bytes. It’s deeply compressed. Twelve words from Voltaire can hold a lifetime of experience.

Amen. And that is why story and art matter.