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This book includes:
- An easy way to get started
- How to format your script correctly
- How to find production companies
- How to choose the perfect title
- Understanding Hollywood industry standards
- The 5 essential books you *must* read - Hollywood insists
on it!
- How to adapt a novel into a screenplay
- How to squeeze in more action
- How to add more pace
- How to add emotional impact
- Getting the action-dialogue balance right
- Understanding movie budgets
- All about optioning
- All about concepts
- All about running times
- Speculative scripts and test scripts - and why you
should write one
- 2 clever tricks you can learn
from Hollywood
- 6 ways of adding more layers
to your screenplay
- How to make your own video
- How to load your screenplay
with great ideas
- How to predict what audiences
will be watching in
the future
- 3 ways to reveal a
character's thoughts
on screen
- Easy ways to produce
your own storyboard
- How to identify
a movie's turning
point
- How to make sure
your script
isn't too predictable
- How to write
a movie script
in
real time
- How to write
a TV series
or soap
opera
- Plus 8
movie
scenes that
*always*
work
- And much
more
- far
too
many
great
ideas
to
list here!
Sample idea: Sub-plots versus main
plots
A story that would be too weak to work on its own can sometimes
make a great sub-plot. Here's a story you might like to use.
A girl has been set a homework problem by her maths teacher.
She can't do it, so she asks her father to help. He can't do
it either, and he starts asking other people to help. Eventually
he finds a maths professor who agrees that it's a particularly
difficult question. He agrees to work on it and call back when
he has an answer. Eventually he does, and the girl and her father
go to see him. He has to talk them through the answer a number
of times because it's so complicated. Eventually the girl understands
it and commits it to memory. She puts the answer in her schoolbook,
complete with all the working out. But it turns out that there
was an error on the homework sheet her teacher gave her, and
the real question was quite simple. You might like to consider
rewarding the girl and her father in some way.
That's a great short story, but it probably wouldn't work on
its own as a movie. So let's turn it into a sub-plot. We need
a bigger story for the main plot. Let's say that the girl's father
is a master criminal. We can show him plotting to steal priceless
jewels, committing the crime, getting involved in police chases
and so on. And all the while he's churning over the maths problem
and looking for someone who might know how to work it out. We
see two very different sides to him.
Or how about if his daughter has an illness or disability and
he's stealing the jewels to raise money for her treatment? The
sub-plot shows how much he really cares about her. He isn't the
one-dimensional hardened criminal that he first appears to be.
Next time you come up with an idea for a story, think about
whether it would work as a main plot or a sub-plot. If it's a
sub-plot, you can, as we've just seen, easily construct a main
plot around it. The main plot contains all the action but the
sub-plot contains (or supports) the movie's real theme,
and adds an extra dimension to the characters.
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