Spacing & Margin Tips for 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. Spacing in margins. This is the absolute most important part of your entire script. This is what makes your screenplay an actual screenplay. So, in this instance, we're going to be using screenwriting software which will do a lot of it for you. So what we have here is everything's completely spaced out the way it's supposed to look. I'll actually start explaining this in a second. If you're going to be using something like Microsoft Word or another actual just text word processing document, you're going to be wanting to do these margins on your own. I do recommend getting the screenplay software if you're actually going to start writing something like this. But, what we have here; is our actual - we call them 'sluglines'. This one here is a scene heading. This says "exterior forest night." This will actually be what describes your actual scene: exterior, of course it'll be the outside. Forest is an actual location. Night is the time of day. So this one right here - our scene heading - is one and a half inches from the edge of the page. So if you're doing this in Microsoft Word, make sure to set your margin one and a half inches from the page. That's this right here. So now if you space down just one, we have our action. Now this is where you're going to put anything that's going to happen. If people are running, things are exploding, whatever it is. This is your actual action script here. So what we do - like I said, its one space down. It's again one and a half inches margin from the left. It's completely justified to the left, and you go ahead and type your action script here. Action right here should only be about four to five lines long. This one is four. This is one, two, three and four. If you're going to be writing more action before dialogue, just go ahead and hit space and have a space in between and then continue to write four to five lines. After that we have our dialogue. What it's going to start off with is a character. Characters are always capitalized completely and they're going to be 3.75 inches off the left margin. Again, if you?re doing this in Microsoft Word, you're going to have to set these margins yourself. Using screenwriting software, you go ahead and type "character" and it's going to put it exactly where it needs to be. It's basically centered to the page, but they all align at the 3.75 inches off. Again, it's supposed to be one hundred percent capitalized. Now to enter the dialogue, you go ahead and click space once. Now you're in the dialogue mode. And you go ahead and type. And the dialogue spacing is two and a half inches from the left. Which is right here. So if you went off this way, it would be two and a half inches all the way to the edge of the page. So, in your dialogue, you can go ahead and type as much as you want to type here. It will actually go from two and a half inches to five and three quarters, which should be right around here, all the way to right. So all your dialogue will be just like at the center of your page. Action script will go from one end of the page to the other. Your description on the top - same thing. It can go from one end of the page to the other. But your actual dialogue will be centered completely in the middle of the page."