How to Format Heading When Writing Movie Script

Video Transcript

"Just to recap we have the title done. It's Donnie the Sea Captain. Your Fade-in, your narrative. Donnie tosses and turns in his bed. He is awakened from the loud blasts from a ship. Now awake Donnie runs to the window, just in time to see a boat with people having a party. Suddenly Donnie's father opens the door. A startled Donnie jumps in his bed, pulling the covers over his head. So you can see that with this narrative it's quite visual. you can see things happening and moving. Now of course I'm doing this to test you to see if you can tell me what's missing. What’s missing? This looks like what we did before, but something’s missing isn’t it? Of course it is! It's the scene heading! I wanted to see if you would spot it. Interior (int) means that its inside we're in Donnie’s bedroom and its night. That is what was missing. Okay. You'll notice that there's no dialogue. Okay, so let's say (I wouldn’t put dialog here) but for the sake of this instruction we will. Suddenly Donnie’s father opens the door. A started Donnie Jumps in his bed and pulls the covers over his head. Donnie's father which will be in this margin here. And will be all in caps. "I SAW YOU AT THE WINDOW!" "Why aren't you asleep?” Okay? So that's the margin that Donnie's father’s character would be in. And this is the margin for the dialog. So we have several margins. We have a margin for the scene heading. We have a margin for the narrative. We have a margin for a character name and a margin for dialog. Now if Donnie responds to him. It would be here, right there also in 'caps'. And Donnie would say “I am asleep father". Now for the sake of this demonstration I'm going to throw in some more narrative. So that you can see the format and how it’s supposed to work. So I’m going to put some information here after "I am asleep father". Donnie pulls covers from his face. And let’s say we wanted to have somebody say something else again, we would have Donnie's father say "you're funny"! Now let’s say we want Donnie's father to do an expression of some sort. It wouldn’t necessarily go into the narrative because that describes what’s going on in the scene. So you would have Donnie's father laugh if you would in parenthesis here. It would say 'Laughs'. And in the event he's going to continue talking, he might say "now go to sleep". So you see where parenthetical would come, which is basically an emotion. It tells the character who is reading the script what his action is. That would go there in the brackets and it would not go in here. Well there you go. That's it in a nutshell. How to write a movie in fifteen minutes. There's a lot more to it, as you can appreciate. If you need help you can always write me. I'm easy to find my reference is www.imdb.com as a reference. That is the internet, movie database. You can look me up there. You can email me directly at filmgodstudios@aol.com. I can help you anyway you want. I can help you assess your ideas. I can help you write it beginning to end, whatever you need. My rates are very affordable. Good luck and good movie."