How to Determine Screenplay Script Timing

Video Transcript

"How to Determine Screenplay Script Timing. 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 12- Script Timing. I have a script right here. This is about ten pages long. This is something that I wrote a while ago. This is, of course, for a short film. The way to think about script timing is the average is one minute per page. So what we have here, with that standard, is, it's mainly one page of dialogue will equal one minute of action time on screen. So this page right here, which is majority dialogue, will be about one minute on screen of course. Now where that differs is on pages like this. If you could see this one here, this is majority action lines, action scripting. So tons, tons, tons, tons, action, action, action, action, action, and two little lines on the bottom. So your action script will actually determine how long your scene is going to be. If I have things that are going to be in slow mo, or there's going to be flashbacks, or there's things that are obviously going to take longer--if it says, "somebody building something"--things like that, the scene, of course, will be longer. I know the script, well of course, 'cause I just wrote it and I just wrote it a while ago, but I will say that this page right here would be anywhere between two and three minutes long. So instead of the movie being ten pages, ten minutes long, already, just off the first page, I'm at twelve or thirteen, fourteen minutes. So that's a good way to determine what the timing is going to be. So the average hundred page script will be about a hundred minutes long depending on the action script, of course. So, that's how you do your script timing."