As dull as this may be, the start is about mathematics. I suggested books in the first part of this series on purpose. Practice your moderately redundant reading skills and learn from them, because I am not telling you what is in the public domain. Done it? I am talking about what you get from experience, not from reading, but you need to read first.
A film script written in a scriptwriting programme is about 120 pages of A4 or Letter size for a 2-hour film. I use Final Draft but Celtx is also useful. One page of script is one minute of film. Blake Snyder’s dogmatic rules are well-advised. Really, do them, but know you can throw them out later. If your first ten pages to the 'inciting incident' do not hook the reader, rewrite again because, at that point, your script is binned without a rejection letter.
Three months is what you expect to be paid for a 120-page script. In Zambia, you would be lucky! A tv-hour, an episode of a series, is around 56 minutes, 56 pages, which is an hour of programming with advertisements. A tv-½ hour is more saleable because ½-hour gaps need filling. Smart writers design their films to fit ad breaks because they are time to ‘put-the-kettle-on’; smarter writers take advantage of the enforced Brechtian point.
What does a book for adaptation look like? On average, feature films have 60 scenes. A scene defines a location, simply EXT. FOREST - NIGHT or INT. OFFICE - DAY. It is the senior class of the scriptwriting hierarchy in your writing programme. If the film is 120 minutes, 120 pages, each scene is two pages, two minutes. This is a rhythm. If four scenes are concurrent in the same location, I maintain the four scene headings to ensure there is tangible change between each in the two-minute rhythm. If you do not, the director, cinematographer and editor will.
You probably dimly recall writing at school and having to conform to the beginning, middle and end philosophy of Aristotle. This is the three-act structure used by many. There are other models, Shakespeare uses five, but there are always at least three. The halfway point is also a staging post. So, what is the perfect storm in three acts and sixty chapters, and happens to be one of the finest examples of English literature, famous for its opening paragraphs?
Fortunately, the BBC, other British film institutions and the film industry are (or were) obliged or predisposed towards writing scripts to support the British education system, which has resulted in excellent films and series with meaningful quotes straight out of the nation’s great literature, including Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens.
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, one of the greatest novels of British literature, is in three acts and has 61 chapters. The first volume/act is 23 chapters, act two is 19 chapters, two minutes per scene for a feature film, or ten chapters to a tv-hour episode in a six-part series. So, one chapter is two minutes or six minutes.
Best regards,
Peter Langmead
P.S. Please do have a look at my website here, for all sorts of interesting things about my film productions, operas and books on social photography. Remember, if there is no spit on your lens, you are not close enough - I do not know who said that but it is true. Feel free to ask questions. My last film is 'The Borderline', which can be watched here.
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