Media Studies 2009-2011

Once you’ve captured your idea onto paper, then you can visit the innumerable sites created to help writers turn raw ideas into workable scripts. Once you have received tons of encouragement and suggestions, you need to turn the description you have into an outline or a more technical treatment. The terminology can, at this stage, get confusing, as different approaches to early development are referred to in different ways (such as outlines, synopses, treatments). The essential thing is to develop the idea into a structured story that will work as a screenplay.

At this point you can show your work to others and get feedback, you can then rework the idea and think about what makes it cinematic. Who are the characters? What is the plot, the premise, the theme? When these components have come together in your mind it’s time to put your story down in script format. Production companies and directors are used to scripts that look a certain way, so it is worth getting to grip with industry conventions early on.

Sticking to industry standard formatting will help to give you a rough idea of the length of the film. Standard formatting roughly equates to a page per minute. You will need to continue developing your project, responding to criticism and absorbing new ideas into your script. If you are working with film and/or TV professionals, it’s very likely that you will go through a number of drafts.

Tags: tasks

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 10th, 2009 at 10:46 am and is filed under Scripts, tasks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.