Initial Scriptwriting and Gathering of Actors

For the the two weeks prior to today I have been writing up my initial script, as of today the page count is fifteen. While writing these pages I have also outlined several scenes and the general arc of the story. I’ve decided on a story that consists of five main characters, I have found an actor for each of these five roles also.

Going into this project I expected a decent amount of difficulty out of the gate and this was very much an accurate expectation. When it comes to writing dialogue and fleshing out distinct characters I have a grasp on it and feel comfortable with the task. What causes issue is the both the matter of formatting and adapting to a medium which requires that I select camera angles, transitions and scene descriptions. Now it is true that it is not necessary for me to write in camera directions into my script, yet seeing that I am also the director that work will have to be completed by me at some point in the process so I have committed to including it in the script.

As you can imagine, being essentially void of any experience with scriptwriting my work thus far has included many questions. These first two weeks have been just as much research as actually writing if not more. What I quickly learned while writing was that online community of screenwriters is almost never in agreement on formatting nor do they have a website thought of as the standard. As a result I purchased a book called “The Screenwriter’s Bible” by David Trottier, which was suggested to me by several writers I am in contact with. It has since been my go to for research.

Another thing I quickly learned was that much of scriptwriting is tedious if you’re without software that does much of the formatting for you. After a quick search I found the program Adobe Story which has done all that I need from it.

Thus far I have read through eleven pages of my script with my actors and received positive feedback, I intend to share it later on this week with my father and my mentor as I expect they will give me more constructive criticism.

All and all I am greatly enjoying the project and look forward to completing the script and getting to filming.