Know Your Craft

When creating your characters, they should each have a specific role and serve a purpose in telling your story.  There’s more to adding characters than giving them lines.  (See the article on Creating New Characters for further explanation.)  Every lead and supporting character should fall into one or more of these archetypal categories:  Archetypes Hero: admirable, likeable, lead to story [...]

I think the worst feedback you can get aside from “I liked it” is “Sure, there are some problems, but ‘it’s just a movie’”.  You should never excuse illogical or unrealistic scenarios simply because ‘it’s only a movie’. I recently watched several action movies and found I most enjoyed the films that were realistic or [...]

Visual style is something that is often neglected or overlooked.  Many new writers just put the story on paper and forget about the camera altogether.  The resulting script is often just a series of locations with basic action and dialogue, which isn’t wrong, it just leaves a lot open to interpretation. Visual style isn’t the [...]

Everything you put in your script contributes to tone.  Tone is the mood or feeling the audience gets from the show that underscores your overall message, giving your show a distinctive voice. Every show has a tone, but some are stronger than others.  The ones with a weaker voice are more or less ‘cookie cutter’ shows: the characters are a [...]

Some writers will say that any instructions for directors is bad, while others will say some is okay.  Again, don’t look to professional screenplays for the answers because they aren’t spec scripts; they’re more than likely shooting scripts.  When you write a spec script, you want to keep the camera out of it.  The purpose [...]