Though the episode is an hour-long, the script itself is 41 pages. For those of you who have watched, this is an episode where action heavily outweighs dialogue. In fact, if you find an online pdf of the script , you will notice that many of the pages are doubled with plenty of blank space. This can help with understanding the pacing the film is supposed to take while reading.
Understanding how your screenplay relates to timing on-screen can help you pace your film accordingly. For the most part, the average scene in a film is one to three minutes long.
This means that it is essential to be concise and direct. Considering that, over the history of film, the average shot length and scene length have only been diminishing. If you are submitting to studios, know that these people have to read hundreds of scripts and are extremely critical. Trust me, if you have plenty of scripts to read, seeing paragraphs of text can turn you off. Keeping it short lets the story move quickly and often makes for an easier read.
For the most part, a sequence will consist of three to five scenes of course, remember these numbers are all suggestions. That means your default sequence will be pages or minutes. If your sequence is full of action, as many are, it will be shorter. Too much jumping around too quickly is disorienting and should be avoided unless intentional. It is also important to remember that you will want your sequences to fit into your different acts.
If you are having trouble with length and feel a need to fill space, you will end up writing unnecessary pages. Perhaps it should be a TV show instead of a movie or vice versa.
All that to say, if you pay attention to the page length and the length of your scenes, you can vary the pacing and juxtapose moments of action with moments of dialogue to create a dynamic and interesting read. However, the writer needs to be aware of the acceptable page lengths for different genres. If a writer follows the business closely, the writer will know when the changes take place.
For this genre, the acceptable length is pages. This category also includes Crime Drama and Film Noir. This genre should come in around pages. This page length includes all thrillers; action thriller, supernatural thriller, crime thriller, etc.
RomComs should come in slightly shorter than a feature-length Comedy. Unlike Comedies, RomComs tend to have a chase scene at the end that moves fast. This accounts for the difference in the page count. Action should be around pages. Keep the Action Adventure around pages.
Unlike Action, the Action Adventure relies more heavily on exotic backdrops mixed with dialogue, so the writer can get away with the longer page count.
Animation scripts should read between pages. In an Animation, the writer is the director. This column and its author were recently criticized in some very strident terms on a well-known screenwriting podcast. I did not listen to the podcast and do not intend to, but apparently the gist of the criticism is that I set myself up as some sort of all-wise, all-knowing screenwriting guru who lays out rules for script writing that the podcast hosts do not find valid.
As regular readers of this column know, I have never presented myself as any sort of guru. I am an experienced script writer, reader and consultant and present myself only as such.
I do not insist that I know it all or that people must do as I say — my position has always been that if you find my advice helpful, please use it and if you do not, then please feel free to ignore it. I have no problem with anyone disagreeing with anything I write, but I do not understand why the podcasters felt the need to be so vitriolic. I especially do not understand personal attacks on my character from two people who have never met me and do not know me.
I also wish they had gotten their facts straight — for the record, neither this blog nor this website have anything to do with Final Draft Script magazine used to be owned by Final Draft, Inc.
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