Screenplay formatting matters, but not in the way you think. Like we promised in our site manifesto, we firmly believe that the only rules for screenwriting are that your writing needs to be clear, and that your writing needs to serve the story. Everything outside of that is just convention and tradition, and you can break whatever convention you need to on the page to make your read engaging.
But that doesn’t mean you should just ignore those conventions.
What is Screenplay Formatting?
Screenplay formatting are the basic guidelines for how scripts should be presented on the page. The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences has a great resource for how, generally, a script should look, including margins.
These conventions have evolved over the last 100+ years of filmmaking. In the time of silent movies, scripts were just lists of shots interspersed with the occasional title card. But as movies have grown more complex so too have screenplays. Their formatting has changed to better capture and express the many different ways film can be utilized to tell a story.
Another great way to learn screenplay conventions is to read scripts. You should especially focus on recent spec scripts, like those on the Black List, Hit List, and Blood List amongst others, or each year’s new batch of pilots, to see what screenwriting looks like right now.
(As it just so happens, by being a member of the Screenwriters Network, which is free to join, you can gain access to our library of 15,000+ scripts, including the above lists and pilots.)
A quick note – while these days television and film scripts are largely the same, the one exception is the Multi-Cam Sitcom (though even this is starting to phase out). Multi-Cams are closer to their stageplay predecessors, with all-caps stage directions, greater spacing between lines, and frequent underlining. If you’d like to know more, you can read the scripts for Multi-Cams to see how these are done.
But Why Should I Care?
The Screenplay Format is there to help you tell your story. By having an agreed upon way of doing things, anyone familiar with screenplays can pick up your script and understand what you want to say. You and this reader have a shared language that makes communicating easier and faster.
Now, like we said at the top, these are conventions not rules. But before you go breaking them, understand why we have them and what their use is. Have a purpose for discarding these conventions and striking out your own. Make sure that the intention behind this choice is clear, so the reader understands what you’re doing and why. Because when you break traditional formatting, it can be a red flag, especially when it’s done in a careless or uncontrolled fashion.
What you don’t want is to give the reader an opportunity to decide the script isn’t worth their time and put it down, because it seems like the writer is a novice who hasn’t bothered to take the time to learn how to format a script.
A great example of how to do this well is in Brian Duffield’s script for The Babysitter. Duffield already has a pretty playful voice in his script, so the reader has been primed for writing that’s going to be pretty loose on the page. When the reveal comes at the end of Act 1 of what exactly is happening in the movie, he completely discards all norms of screenwriting to make sure it lands with the reader the surprise and shock the main character, and by extension the audience, is experiencing. And because it’s in service of the story, and is supported by pages of controlled writing before this shift, it works beautifully. You have no doubt as to what he’s doing, why, or if it’s on purpose.
How Do I Apply This in my own Writing?
Again, we cannot emphasize enough, go out and read scripts. Find writers you like and read more of their work. Pay attention to when they ignore convention and why. Analyze it – what are their objectives and the tactics used to achieve those objectives?
Then put it into practice. Writer a short and mess with format in the same way. Give it to readers who know how to read screenplays and see if what you’re doing seems controlled and purposeful to them. Then take what you’ve learned and try it again. Just like with all writing – Try, Fail, Try Again, Fail Better. Such is the way.
The good news is there are always new ways to reinvent the form. So get reading, get writing, get those conventions down and then start having fun with them.
Fred Pelzer
Managing Editor
On Spec