How to Breakdown Scripts for Production Boards

Video Transcript

"Hi, Chris Cobb for Expert Village, welcome back. You'll notice I've gotten rid of all the production boards and all that sort of thing. It's because they are not necessary at the time. That's the end result. What we're going to do right now is start at the beginning process of breaking down your script. Now, as I mentioned, you do eighths of a page and each page equals eight eighths because eight eighths equals one. So, each page is one page and as you break it down, you are going to find that some pages seem to have more than eight eighths on there. You can put that extra eighth in there. I tend not to. I tend to figure out which scene is the simplest one and turn that whether it looks like a longer scene or a bit more I turn that into less eighths so that page always adds up to eight eighths of page. So come a little closer and I'll show you what I do. The first thing I do is, you know, I start with a script. I always take the brads out. You don't need them and you're going to start flipping through it anyway. So you take the script, put the brads over there. You're just going to walk through it with your pencil. You almost scan it. You read it a bit, but as much as anything you're kind of scanning it and you're looking for the visual pattern in here. So for instance, this first scene, I'm going to call those two eighths of a page. And I write it right here, the margin. The rest of the scene, scene two takes up the rest of the page and so if it's eight eighths of a page remember so that it equals one page, the rest must enter six eighths. Okay. And I write that right here in the margin: two, six eighths, so then, on to the next page. And this entire page is a continuation of scene two. So I just put a one, it's all one page, eight eighths of a page. And then I am on to the next page. And here we have a break and scene three enters. so, this bit of the scene is I'm going to say again two lines and one shot. I'm going to call that actually one eighth because it looks like there's a lot going on here. And we call this what else: seven eighths. Sorry if my seven's are a little funky, that's how I write. And then we turn the page and we do it again. Going again right at the next bit; this one looks a little longer. I'm going to say that's three eighths of a page and so on and so forth. I'll keep breaking down this script. You go ahead and break down your script. I'll see you in a bit."