Writing Scripts.

A screenplay at its essence shows a story through images. Think of your favorite movie and visualize your favorite scenes rolling across the screen. A writer first visualized the concept for those scenes and wrote them in a way to be visual, but without telling the director, actors, cameraman, or designers how to do their job. Good screenplays take advantage of strong imagery and visual metaphors rather than long descriptions for storytelling. Compelling dialogue fills in where more information is needed to develop relationships or story. Screenplays also use specific formatting conventions, and like novels, some genre conventions. These are key elements that must be in place for a reader to become engaged with the story. After all, every screenplay is read before it ever makes it to the screen. If the reader can’t see it playing in his or her mind’s eye, or doesn’t recognize the format, it will never get to the big screen. To format our script, we are using a software called Celtx. This formats the scrip in 12. Font, Courier Font, and it is formatted so that we know that one page is one minute of script.