Transitions are also right-aligned and are all capitalized. Even if the film actually cuts in or cuts out, as was the case with The Assurance. At the beginning and ending of the script, it's kinda common practice to start and end with the transitions fade in and fade out, respectively. Now there are a few notable exceptions here. So, putting in the screenplay camera moves, or camera angles, or what music the soundtrack is playing, what type of transition the editor should use, how the actor should perform a scene, all this stuff is really frowned upon. The film world is a house of order and people get really bent out of shape when you overstep your bounds in every stage of the game. My fifth rule for writing a screenplay is that you're also allowed to put in transitions and directions with the caveat that you be very careful with these. Now again, all this is only done the first time the characters are introduced. To help the people who read the Assurance script to know the characters and feel more at home in this world, I also put a little pronunciation guide so that readers knew how to pronounce their names. And for the reader to have some sense of who this person is. Giving characters a little introduction in the script is basically to just kind of announce the arrival on the scene of a new person. You are the writer, not the director, so you don't have control over casting decisions. So, if you imagine a character having blonde hair just because that's how you see it, don't write it in. We can also write a physical description of them if and only if it is essential to the story. My fourth rule here, when we introduce a character for the first time, and only for the first time, we capitalize their name and put their age in parentheses. One of the reasons it's done this way is because it will help us tremendously when we break down the script for shooting, which we'll look at how to do in the next training course on pre-production. But for screenplays, each change of venue gets its own slugline, regardless of what's happening in the scene. So, if a character is shaving in the bathroom and yelling back and forth with someone in the kitchen, it will be a new scene heading every time we see each character say something, even though this is technically the same scenes in a dramatic sense at least. When creating scene headings, this is done every time there's a new camera setup, not necessarily a scene in the dramatic sense. If scenes are really close together in time, sometimes of the time of day is continuous, or you could even write later. After the location, then space, hyphen, space, and the time of day. But it does need to be consistent throughout the script if it's the same location. Now this name can be whatever you want it to be. There is a space and the name of the location, still in all caps. The slugline is written in all caps with the interior, exterior info first, abbreviated with the first three letters and a period. The scene heading contains three components: a location, whether that location is indoors or outdoors, indicated by INT for interiors or EXT for exteriors, and a time of day. Third rule, scenes are identified by scene headings, also called a slugline. Instead you would write, Melissa walks down the street. You don't wanna write I saw Melissa walk down the street, or Melissa walked down the street, or even Melissa is walking down the street. Sounds crazy, but let me give you an example. The second rule is that all description is written from the perspective of an omniscient third person in the simple present tense with active verbs. We only put things in the script that can be seen or said. You can't write Bob felt angry, or Sarah waited for three hours, or Ta'ani didn't want to tell Korda'a about her powers. And that's it! No feelings, no thoughts, no intangibles. The most important rule is that you only have two ways to tell your story: dialogue and description, where you can describe what the camera sees. But before the margins and the fonts and all those details, let's look at a few rules for writing a screenplay. Looking at a screenplay, it can be a little overwhelming to the uninitiated. This is incredibly helpful to know when preparing to create a film. The Assurance script is a little less than seven full pages, and the film is a little less than seven full minutes. That means that a twenty page script will more than likely produce a twenty minute film. Formatting for screenplays is a big deal because when you follow the rules, one page of screenplay roughly translates to about one minute of screen time. Now formatting screenplays is not just some pointless formality like MLA formatting for English papers. In this very important important tutorial, we're going to look at how to format your screenplay.
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