13 August 2011

One script page = one film minute

When you write for television, there are time frames - scripts are clocked, they need to fit into slots. The better you learn your screenwriting craft, the more the good old "one script page = one film minute" rule will apply to your work.

Script 100p - film 99m - nuff said
While I mention TV in the opener, this concerns features just as well. Let's face it, any reader (wherever in the movie biz hierarchy that reader may sit) prefers crisp over expansive, short over long. We're writers, we love to write ... and that usually means we write too much. Especially newbies have, in addition to the former, a good dose of insecurity going into their scripts. Insecurity makes you want to fill in EVERYTHING, you're writing down way too much just to make sure the reader doesn't miss out on anything you've invested into your story. A beginner cannot have that level of trust and so the "over-writing" is entirely normal.

You have to learn to trust your words.

This trust only comes through years of honing your craft, analyzing great scripts and writing all the time, working your writing muscle as much as you possibly can. Learn to trust that your 5 word sentence can grip the reader's imagination and conveys everything you want him/her to experience. Learn that what you've just written in four action lines can be told through a single glance. If this sounds easy to you - great! You just may be a natural. But for most of us this takes years of training, practice.

I've been at this screenwriting thing for almost 20 years now - and it still happens to a degree. My latest gig is a TV adaptation of the great Craig Russell serial killer novel "Blood Eagle" - and I've delivered a very tight first draft - 94 crisp pages of multi-layered twistedness. A professional timer has clocked the 94 page draft with 104 minutes. Now, even if the timer may have been a bit too generous in clicking that stop watch - there obviously still is some fat in the draft. Aside from some bigger structural adjustments I need to make (you can't shave 10 minutes with just trimming the little stuff), I will look at every sentence, every word, again.

The "one script page = one film minute" rule works - but only if you apply all that hyper-concentrated screenwriter thinking to every single line.

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