Movie Script Length

Video Transcript

"So, we talked about introducing characters in Act 1 and further to that in Act 1 you're going to introduce your main characters, of course. And then you are going to introduce any other characters that you want to have, all others. You really don't want to continue adding new characters all the way through the movie if they have an important part in the film. So that all the characters introduced in Act 1 are all developed and all resolved in part 3. So, you know, take care not to write in too many, too many, too many, extra, extra people. Especially if you are trying to make a low budget film. You want to concentrate on the important people in the story. How much do you write?, and how does that work? Well, Act 1 is about one quarter of the story. Act 2 is about one half and Act 3 is about a quarter of the story. So Act 2 is the most information there. Which is why worldwide writers and films and books and stories always have problems with Act 2 because it's the longest section. Sometimes it gets the weakest response because there's so much information to give, it's sometimes not as exciting and some scripts fall down in Act 2. So you want to keep it really alive in Act 2. Now, what is one quarter mean? It's actually probably about 25 pages. This is about 40 pages and this is about 25 pages. OK, so an average script, feature film, is about 90 pages, 90 to 120. Your first time out I would stick with 90. It also means that writing a script is basically like this, one page of words or dialogue equals one minutes of screen time. One page of dialogue equals approximately 1 page of screen time. Now if you have a lot of action in your narrative, which I will explain in a moment what a narrative is. If you have a lot of action in there, you have helicopters blowing up, you got love scenes, you got a storm, you got an earthquake. It's going to be a lot more than the one minute. I'm speaking of just people talking when I say one page a minute. And that's it, we'll move on."