Screenwriting

Screenwriting is the art and craft of writing scripts for film, television or video games.

Writing for film is potentially one of the most high-profile and best-paying careers available to a writer and, as such, is also perhaps the most sought after. While it is increasingly difficult to make a living as a Hollywood screenwriter, that does not stop tens of thousands of people from trying every year, as the capricious nature of the film industry makes it possible for a complete unknown to launch a career simply by writing a commercially-appealing screenplay and getting it into the hands of the right people.

Screenwriting formats

Motion picture screenplays intended for submission to mainstream studios, whether in the US or elsewhere in the world, are expected to conform to a standard typographical style known widely as studio format which stipulates how elements of the screenplay such as scene headings, action, transitions, dialog, character names, shots and parenthetical matter should be presented on the page, as well as the font size and line spacing.
One reason for this is that, when rendered in studio format, most screenplays will transfer onto the screen at the rate of approximately one page per minute. This rule of thumb is widely contested ? a page of dialog usually occupies less screen time than a page of action, for example, and it depends enormously on the literary style of the writer ? and yet it continues to hold sway in modern Hollywood.
There is no single standard for studio format. Some studios have definitions of the required format written into the rubric of their writer's contract. The Nicholl Fellowship, a screenwriting competition run under the auspices of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, has a useful and accurate guide to screenplay format. A more detailed reference is The Complete Guide to Standard Script Formats (Cole and Haag, SCB Distributors, 1980, ISBN 0-929583-00-0).
Screenplays are traditionally 90-120 pages long. Comedies and children's films tend to weigh in at the lower end.
Screenplays are almost always written using a monospaced font, often a variant of Courier or Courier New, both mostly used as 12 pt font.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

news