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Film Writing

A Little Bit to Help You Learn About Writing Films

By Nathan MillerPublished 6 years ago 3 min read
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We all love watching movies. We pay to go see them in theaters, buy the DVDs and Blu-rays of them, they are a good excuse to sit back, eat popcorn, and relax. But have you ever tried writing the script for a film? It is a lot harder of a process than people think. You need to come up with a full plot, list of characters, different scenes, basically you have to create a full movie. I have written quite a few, and I will try to give those of you that are interested in this topic tips on how to make script writing a bit easier.

Now, one of the biggest parts of writing a film is knowing what genre of movie you want to make. There are tons of types of films including drama, action-adventure, comedy, superhero, maybe even a mixture of multiple genres, it's up to you. What you need to do is decide what genre of film you want to make.

Also, the plot. Your plot is vital to your film. Each film needs a good story to go by otherwise, it's not really a movie much at all, but rather just random characters doing whatever. The plot carries your characters through whatever they go through whether it's a couple trying to get with each other, a superhero trying to defeat his/her villain or someone working to achieve a goal in any way possible. Your plot is your story, and you, as a writer, need to have a good story to make a good film.

Next, let's talk about your characters. You want to have characters that could carry your story incredibly well. In a movie, people always focus on the characters, they love seeing someone that they could possibly relate to in some way and root for them or hate them, depending on whether the character is good or bad, all depends on the writing. Your goal for these characters is to make them how you think they would be and act how you think they would act in different situations. For instance, the film called The Room (yes, I brought up that movie). Tommy Wiseau played a guy named Johnny, he acted angry when he found out about his fiancee, Lisa's betrayal with his friend Mark. That's an example of a character acting in a way based on their situation. It's not a good example since it is from that movie, also known as one of the best worst movies ever. Like I said, you want your characters to act based on how you think they'd act.

Oh, before I forget, one of the biggest things you need to focus on is the formatting of your script. If you don't format your script correctly, movie studios will pretty much trash it without even considering reading it. You could have a giant Oscar winning script on your hands, but any movie studio will probably trash it all because you didn't format it right. For more info on formatting, I recommend this website. This will surely help you in writing your script. Or, if you would rather find an easier way by trying a program that uses auto-formatting, I would have to say there are plenty of programs such as Amazon Storywriter (I currently use this one), Trelby (also use this one on occasion), Celtx, Plotbot, or WriterDuet. But, if you use the last of the suggestions, try not to make it over 120 pages or the site starts to act up a bit.

Overall, those are a few suggestions to help you in your film script writing (screenplay writing). I hope you read a lot into this and that it may have inspired you to start writing your own movies. Maybe sometime I will write more into specifics on script writing, but only if you readers want me to. Anyway, I'm gonna leave this off here, thank you for reading and make sure to credit me when you win at the Oscars.

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About the Creator

Nathan Miller

My name is Nathan Miller and I am a fan of writing in all forms from screenwriting to writing short stories to nonfiction pieces about the things that I love. I hope you enjoy reading my pieces as much as I enjoyed writing them.

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