Poetry, Novels, Movie Scripts pt3

Sorry for the delay in this post.  It has been a very busy week for me with writing.  As you can guess by the title of this post, this is part 3; movie scripts.  This is something I am getting more familiar with each day.  With writing movie scripts, the first thing you need to do is buy the Final Draft program.  This one program is what every agent and production company wants you to use and it also helps to guide you along with an in depth (and complicated) tutorial of how to use the program. 

When writing a movie script, you have to keep as much of the focus on the dialog.  The dialog is how you should be telling your story.  The Action portion of the script is used to setup the scene setting intially and when there is a need to describe a character's action.  The typical length of a movie script goes from 90-120 pages.  The industry does not want you to go over 120 pages because each page equates for one minute of film.  If you are writing 120 pages or more for every script, 1. you better make sure the content of the story and characters are excellent, 2. you need to cut down some of the pages if they're not excellent, 3. the production company will look at it and think there's not enough content and will pass on the script. 

I have found out first hand that it is harder to write a book and then go into writing a movie script.  When writing a book/novel, you are focusing on the details through both dialog and narative writing in order to get the reader interested and at the same time get them to imagine what they are reading.  When writing a movie script your focus to detail has an estimated page limit to get the reader/production company/actor to understand the characters, what motivates them, what the conflict is, and the story as a whole.  Also when converting a book to script, it is very difficult due to having to cut back on the original content to save on your page count.  This is something I am learning first hand currently, because I am taking my first novel and creating a movie script out of it.  Within the first 10 scenes I have written, I have thrown out more than 10 pages of the book and changed some of the dialog to make it fit better.

That's going to do it for this post.  Please feel free to leave a comment and check out my other posts as well.