How to Bind Screenplays

Video Transcript

"Hello. My name is Tony Ramirez from Tampa, Florida and on behalf of Expert Village; this is how to write a screenplay. Let's get started. Chapter two, binding: So once you've printed, or actually, once you've written your entire script, of course you're Hollywood worthy script, you're going to want to print it out. Once you print it out, you have a big stack like this. This is one of my longer scripts, as you can see its a few hundred pages long, you're going to get these hole punched just like this. This is your standard three hole punch. You can either of course go to Kinko's or some other print place and have them print everything out and pre-hole punch them for yourself or if you've got yourself a trusty hole punch, you can go ahead and do it all by yourself. But, that's pretty much it. So once you have your script printed out, you're going to want to print out your cover page. In a few chapters your going to see how to make your cover page as far as the formatting and everything else. Once you've printed it out, you're going to want to print it out on a hundred and ten pound card stock. This is basically like a business card. So if you can hear that there, it's got that little wave in it, this is thicker of course than the average paper, like I said like a business card, you're going to want to print it out exactly like it's formatted. How you did it on your screen four inches down and centered with your title, and everything else and then you're going to want another one that's completely blank, hole punched as well. This is going to be the back of your script. This is basically the book cover. so what you're going to want to do of course is put the back page on the back just like that. Make sure the holes are lined up, put the front page, cover page, on the front just like that. Now you can see all the holes are lined up. Now this is the important part. This is another one of those things that are, just like I said, formatting. So, one second. I had to get my bigger ones. So these are your brass plated fasteners. These are the clips that are going to hold your script together. This is another thing that's important. For some reason, you've got to have them brass, you've got to have them of course long enough and they only go in two holes. So here's what we're going to do. Go ahead and take your two brass fasteners and for your script you're going to want to do the top hole and then go ahead and pull it back so it's fastened and you're going to want to do the bottom hole. Make sure they're long enough. These are just barely long enough. So if you've got to get bigger ones, go ahead and get bigger ones. But that's it. Now this is your finished screenplay. You see you have your brass fasteners on the top and on the bottom; third hole just stays open like that. This is basically so when somebody is reading it, of course it holds it together all nice and neat just like that and then in the event they would want to put it into a binder when it actually goes into production, go ahead and you have your third hole there. So this is binding your script. Just like that."