Or he gets a phone call informing him his daughter has been kidnaped. Let's say your hero is happily watching a rerun of "Friends," when a spaceship crashes through his roof. This event called the inciting incident, and it normally occurs between ten and fifteen pages into your screenplay. Something yanks him off of his sofa, pries the beer out of his hand, and gives him no choice except to go after his goal right now.
Something happens in a movie that forces the hero act.
Need ideas for conflicts? Download our fun Story Machine. If he just gives up and walks away (or if the audience thinks he should), then you don't have much of a movie there either. On the other hand, your hero has to have an extremely good reason to go to all this trouble. If your hero solves his problem in 5 minutes, you don't have much movie left (all this is assuming you're writing a feature-length film). This means that the roadblocks have to be big enough to keep him busy. The movie will be about your hero's struggle to get past these roadblocks and reach his goal or solve his problem. Or give your hero a problem he has to solve urgently, and put roadblocks in the way of solving it. How do you create a conflict? Think of something your hero desperately wants and put roadblocks in his path. They'd rather go back to their own miserable, but varied, lives. An audience has no reason to sit through two hours of nothing happening. If there's no conflict, if everyone's happy and there's peace and love on Earth, then there's no story. Some writers even report that their characters seem to take over and do the writing for them. Then, as you're writing the script, you will be able to ask yourself at every moment, "What would he or she do now? What would he or she say? How would he or she respond to that?" This will allow you to make the right decisions for your screenplay. But knowing as much as possible about your character will help you think of him or her as a real person. The details you write in the character profile won't all have a place in your film script.
Whatever your situation, it can be helpful to fill out a character profile to get to know your character better. Otherwise, you can get ideas for characters in a lot of places - people you know, people you read about in the newspapers or who catch your eye in the supermarket or the bank. Maybe you already have a clear idea for a movie and know exactly who it will be about. It's probably the one that you know the best, and your passion will come through in the writing. Do you love a particular genre: romantic comedies, action films, horror? Your best bet is to write a movie script in the genre you like to watch. If you've decided to write a movie script, here are some questions to ask yourself.
How to write a movie script - getting started Your chances of becoming a successful screenwriter, on the other hand, are a lot better if you live in L.A. You can write novels from Alaska or Tokyo or from your cell in a federal prison and get them published. You can read interesting commentary about this on Alexandra Sokoloff's screenwriting blog. In fact, the screenwriter whose name appears on the final credits may not be the one who wrote the original screenplay. Before they're produced, screenplays are generally rewritten many times, by many different people. But no one's likely to produce your screenplay either. Of course, as an artist, you are free to break the rules, in the sense that no one will come to your house and arrest you for doing so.
In terms of structure, screenplays also follow a clearer set of rules than novels or short stories. But a screenplay for a feature film is about 100-120 pages long.
More than theater plays, which tend to use dialogue to move their stories along, movies tell their stories in a visual form. Try an experiment: watch a movie on DVD with the sound off. Some aspects of screenwriting that are special: At the bottom of the page, you'll find links to related pages with screenwriting tips and information about free screenplay software. Here you'll find easy tips on getting started, coming up with your screenplay idea and developing your story.
How to Write a Movie Script - Screenwriting Tips 1 This is Part 1 of the CWN series on how to write a movie script.