Based on an earlier Three Page Challenge entry — and with the blessing of writer Andrew McDonald — I’ve posted a new video in which I revise a scene in real time. Along the way, I discuss how small choices on the page can help (or hurt) a reader’s ability to understand where characters are and what’s happening.
As a fun bonus, Andrew has also filmed a demo version of his vision.
Don Donahue writes:
How would you format two transitions in a row?
I’m experimenting with a transition where a drone gets shot down in Alaska. Right now I have…
CUT TO STATIC:
FADE TO BLIZZARD:
Is this acceptable? Is there a better way to do this?
This looks awkward. It feels like there’s something omitted between the two transitions. After all, the point of a transition is that you’re transitioning to something. That something is missing here.
It’s important to understand that by “transition” screenwriters are really talking about two distinct things:
The first kind of transition happens on the right-hand margin, uppercase, often with a colon at the end. It’s unique to screenplay grammar.
In your example, FADE TO BLIZZARD is an example of this kind of transition. It’s strictly cinematic. You’re telling us what we’d see on screen, and giving specific instructions to an imaginary editor.
The second kind of transition happens in all kinds of writing. You see it novels, plays, non-fiction and journalism. I’d argue that at least half of the craft of writing is transitioning smoothly to the next thing.
In your example, CUT TO STATIC is describing what we’re seeing and hearing, but it’s the kind of thing the characters in the scene are probably experiencing firsthand. So I’d leave it in scene description.
Obviously, I don’t know exactly what’s happening in your scene, but let’s imagine it something like this:
Malcolm leans close, pointing to a dark smudge on the screen.
MALCOLM
There! What do you think that is?
DAHLIA
A bunker? Something’s moving inside.
CLOSE ON SCREEN, a FLASH. Something flies straight for the lens. Bright. Hot.
MALCOLM (O.S.)
Shit! A rocket!
Impact! The screen cuts to STATIC.
CROSS-FADE TO BLIZZARD.
EXT. ARCTIC STATION – NIGHT
HOWLING WINDS. The domes of the compound are just barely visible. Yellow work lights wobble.
Fade? Cross-fade? Your call. To me, FADE generally implies that we’re going to black or white.
You’ll notice I put a period after BLIZZARD rather than a colon. Blizzard is the thing we’re cross-fading to, so it feels like a complete thought. I’d give it a period.
The colon makes sense when the object of the transition is in the next line, like this:
DA’VONNE
I know where he’d hide it.
CUT TO:
INT. TRUCK GARAGE – NIGHT
With flashlights, Da’Vonne and Sarah make their way amid the massive semis and trailers.
Here, the CUT TO: is doing the work of both a cinematic transition (a blunt cut to the next place) and a narrative transition (answering the question “Where does Da’Vonne think it’s hidden?”).
Uppercased transitions are a useful tool for screenwriters, particularly when they can do this double-duty. But you’ll read many screenplays that hardly use them at all, and that’s fine too. They’re never strictly necessary.
Back in 2006, I answered a reader question about page counts:
Every screenwriting book I’ve read, class I took, and basically the first rule I learned says:
ONE PAGE OF A PROPERLY FORMATTED SCRIPT = APPROX. A MINUTE OF SCREEN TIME.
I know one page of say a battle can last five minutes whereas one page of quick dialogue my last ten seconds if the actors talk fast. So my question is, is this rule true?
I replied that the page-per-minute rule of thumb didn’t hold up to much scrutiny, and offered examples from my own work.
Then a few weeks ago, I started thinking about this question again, and realized there was an opportunity to reframe the question in a more concrete way:
For screenplays, what is the correlation between screenplay length and running time?
I asked data scientist Stephen Follows if he’d be up for tackling this question. He jumped into action, gathering 761 feature screenplays and comparing them to the running times of their finished films. Today, he published his findings.
The results largely match what I expected, and what I wrote in 2006:
The one-page-per-minute rule of thumb doesn’t hold up to much scrutiny. True, most screenplays are about 120 pages, and true, most movies are around two hours. But the conversion rate between paper and celluloid is rarely one-to-one.1
While Follows finds there is some obvious correlation between page count and running time, the rule of thumb barely works in aggregate but isn’t very predictive for any given project.
Why does it matter? Because too many folks in the film and television industry have internalized one-page-per-minute as an axiomatic truth rather than a crude estimate. Any script that is longer than 120 pages is perceived as being too long. Indeed, some studios’ contracts specify that the writer may not deliver a script longer than 120 pages.2
In order to bring their scripts under this artificial limit, screenwriters waste time making tiny edits with the goal of moving page breaks. It’s pointless busy work.
Worse, the page-per-minute rule of thumb puts too much focus on arbitrary sheets of never-printed paper rather than the words they contain. If we’re worried about the length of anything, it should be scenes and sequences. But in 2020 we continue to treat screenplays as if they’re hand-typed on dead trees, forgoing digital tools that would allow for better security, collaboration and version control.
As an industry, we’re afraid to move to new formats for screenplays because we’re worried it’ll break the page-per-minute standard. But we don’t need to worry, because the rule of thumb was never really true.
Is it appropriate to try to estimate a project’s running time based on the script? Absolutely.
Before a project goes into production, the script supervisor — an experienced professional who works beside the director on set — generally performs a “script timing” by estimating the time for each scene. It’s not perfect, but it better reflects reality. If a script times out to three hours, better to know it before production, so you’re not shooting scenes that won’t make it into the film.
Is there an opportunity for computer-generated running time estimates? Probably.
With machine learning, I can imagine systems that better predict how words on the page will reflect minutes on screen. But I wonder if it’s a false goal. Ultimately, running time is a factor of film editing. Scenes get dropped in post, and it’s very hard to anticipate these changes when looking at a script in preproduction.
This analysis was done on feature films, but every TV show faces similar issues. However, long-running shows have the advantage of knowing how their specific show works. My hunch is that every NCIS script falls in a narrow range of scenes and pages because they know what they need.
Big thanks to Stephen Follows for accepting this challenge and myth-busting this rule of thumb. Be sure to read, share and comment on his post.
I recorded this video to illustrate the different ways screenwriters can indicate dialogue is being interrupted. It’s a situation that happens quite often in most screenplays. The choice of how you show it can impact the read.
There aren’t hard-and-fast rules, but there are definitely conventions, and in this video I cover most of them.