Write Your Short Film Script!

1. Course Introduction: Hi. My name is Joshua Courted. I am a professional screenwriter and an independent filmmaker. I also have over 16 years of college teaching experience. Screenwriting classes directing, producing film history. Welcome to this course on writing a screenplay for your short film. I've made literally hundreds of short films in my career. Short films can be a great way to hone your craft and really learn the process of filmmaking. Can also be a great way to show off a sample of your work as you're trying to move on to bigger and better things like feature films or television. But that being said, Writing a short film is very different from writing a feature or a television. And we're going to get into those differences in this course. We're going to go through the process of creating a concept, a pie for your short film, how to structure a short, avoiding cliches, how to write dialogue, how to go through the actual writing and rewriting process. By the end of this course, you'll be able to write your own screenplay for a short film. And hopefully, you'll be able to use that as the basis to then go and actually make a film production. So stick around for more on how to write your short film script. 2. Course Project: The project for this class is pretty straightforward. You're going to write a script for a short film. The length of your script will ultimately be about six to ten pages. If you want to write more than that, you're welcome to, but that's typically a good length for a short film, especially if it's something that you actually want to produce. If you've never write a short film before, I would suggest very strongly keeping your page count as low as you can. Much lower than five or six pages, it's very hard to actually tell a story in that amount of time. But I would really recommend trying not to go more than ten or 12 pages total because that starts to take up a lot more time and energy and money to actually produce the film. So if this is something that you're writing as practice or to really work on your craft. Page count is a little bit less important, but if it's something that you're actually thinking about producing, you're going to want to try to keep it as short as you can, but long enough to still tell a story. So my recommendation is six to ten pages. You want to make sure that your story has a clear structure, has a clear goal that's attainable for the protagonist, and that the protagonist encounters conflict in order to achieve that goal. You're also going to want to make sure that you have a clear and definitive resolution at the end of the story, that the story comes to a satisfying ending. It may be tragic. It may be you know, a happy uplifting ending, but regardless, there needs to be an ending, a clear point where the story is now over. One other thing that you're going to want to keep mind is formatting. Now, when we talk about page count, that actually is very dependent on making sure that you format your screenplay properly. Generally speaking, one page of properly formatted script should be about the equivalent of 1 minute of screen time. If you formatted your action and your dialogue properly, if you're not overwriting or underwriting, that should work out pretty evenly to about a minute per page. I would recommend using screenwriting software for this. Don't try to use, you know, a normal word processing document, use final draft or writer Duet or Celtics or Highland or something like that. I use final draft. That's typically considered industry standard. Highland is compatible with final draft, so that's a good choice too if final draft is out of your price range. Good screen writing software will help with putting in margins and some of the more formal elements of screenplay formatting. But there's still a lot of other stuff that you should know. I would recommend if you're not real well versed in screenplay formatting. Check out the Hollywood standard by Christopher Riley. This is a really great book. There might be a newer edition out now. It's a really good step by step guide as to how to format a lot of the idiosyncrasies of screenplays. Be writing a screenplay is different from writing prose or a stage play, how we do scene editors, how we write action, how we write dialogue, and paraics, and all that stuff. So if you're not familiar with all of those things, I would very much recommend checking out that book. In this course, we're going to primarily be focusing on story. And so when you write your script at the end, That's going to be the main thing is to make sure that your story is what it needs to be, formatting something you can go back and fix later, but it is an important aspect of it. So settle in and get ready to learn a little bit about writing a screenplay for your short film so that you can, at the end of the course, write your own short film. 3. Shorts vs. Features: Most beginning screenwriters and beginning filmmakers don't have a lot of experience with short form storytelling. Now, you might have experience with short form in terms of, you know, YouTube videos or TikTok or something like that. But actually telling a narrative story in a short film format is something that not a lot of young filmmakers or beginner filmmakers have a real big grasp on. And it's simply because short form narrative filmmaking is not as prevalent of a medium as it once was. Used to be way back in the early days of cinema, 100 years ago, shorts were a normal part of the process. The three stooges made their career on short films. I mean, for almost 30 years, that was what they did was short films. All the classic loony tunes and Tom and Jerry and Droopy. Those were all short films that were released theatrically. But nowadays, we don't really see that as much outside of film festivals. And so when filmmakers set out to write a short film, oftentimes they try to cram a feature film idea or a TV idea into a short form. A short film, though, is different from a feature or a TV show. Typically, you want to have a much simpler concept, something that you can fully explore in the amount of time that you're working. I can't tell you how many times I've had students that have turned in an outline for a script or pitched a concept or even written a first draft of a short, and I look at it and say, this is a feature film. You've crammed 90 minutes of ideas into a ten page script, and everything is going so quickly that there's no time for any nuance for any real character development or thematic exploration. So what you want to think about, when you're developing a short film, is, is this idea something that is appropriate for a short film? Is it a concept that's small enough to go in a short, something that's still story worthy, but that isn't going to necessarily require a feature length or a TV series length in order to fully and properly explore the ideas? Pixar is one of the studios that still regularly makes short films, and they'll often release them theatrically at the beginning of their feature films? So, you may have seen their Oscar winning short film for the Birds? For the Birds is about a bunch of little birds that are arguing over space on a power line. A big, large, awkward bird flies in and wants to join them. And they all kind of make fun of this big, awkward bird. Oh, he's weird looking and kind of strange, and we don't want him to be part of our little group. And then the big awkward bird flies in and gets into the middle of the group of little birds, just kind of, you know, wants to join in. He's a little naive. Doesn't understand they're making fun of and he sits in. And as he sits in the middle of the m, the whole wire just bends down. So the little birds are like, Well, this is annoying, and the big bird sort of flips over and is holding onto the wire, and the little birds start pecking his toes. And as soon as he falls off, the wire snap back up, and all the little birds go flying up. And as they land, all their feathers are gone, and they're like, Oh, no, bird, naked birds, and they hide behind the big bird. It's not even 3 minutes long, but it tells a complete story. It's a concept that's appropriate for a short film. As opposed to something like Lord of the Rings, which takes three very long movies to tell the story. With short films, the other thing you want to keep in mind is practicality. Ideally, you're writing a short so that you can make the film. There's not a lot of money in short films. There's not really a market for short films. So typically, when you're making a short, it's because you want to show it at a film festival or you want to use it as a sample to get hired for making a feature film or commercial or something. It's often used as kind of a calling card. Here's my short film. You know, here's what I can do. Hire me. Well, if your whole goal is to actually produce something, when you're writing your script, make sure that you're writing something that is producible. With feature films, we often let our imaginations kind of run wild because theoretically if you're going to make a feature film, you're going to have a decent sized budget for it. Hopefully, unless you're doing a micro budget type Even then, even when you start getting into features, there are still budget considerations that you have to keep in mind. But with a short film, you probably don't have a studio backing you, you probably don't have investors. You're probably self financing the film. And that means you're going to want to write something that you can actually do. Now, if you've made over short films before, maybe you've got a network of filmmakers and actors and crew that can work with you, maybe you have access to other locations that you know will work out. If you've never made a short film before, you probably don't have those things yet. So you're going to want to think about what resources do you have? And how can you tailor your story to work with that? So to recap, when you're writing the script for a short film, you want to make sure that your concept is small enough to be practical for a short. You want to make sure that you're writing it in such a way that you can actually produce it and use it as an sample. 4. Give It Structure: A. Every narrative story has a structure. Now, one is structure. Structure isn't the same thing as plot. Plot is figuring out what happens. What does the character do? What actions do they take to drive the narrative forward? Structure is how we arrange that. How do we put the pieces together in a way that will be accessible for the audience to understand what we want them to understand? The most basic fundamental type of structure that we have for story is in three parts, beginning, middle, end. It seems very simple, very elementary, but it's amazing how many screenplays I read from inexperienced writers, and even sometimes from experienced writers, where they've left out the middle, or they've left out an ending. Oh, I can see that all the time. Well, it's supposed to be ambiguous. You just don't have an ending. It's not an ambiguous ending. There just isn't an ending. We need to have a resolution at the end. Oftentimes, young filmmakers or inexperienced storytellers, you know, I don't need structure. I don't want to just follow a formula, and we're not talking about formula. We're talking about the things that make a story a story. Robert McKee, the great screenwriting Guru, talks about the idea of form, not formula. The idea that there are things that make a story a story. Let me put it like this. One of the things that you need to make a cheeseburger or cheeseburger. Well, we need the bun? We need the patty, the burger itself. And then if it's cheese burger, we need cheese. But within that basic structure, that beginning, middle, and end, the, the patty and the cheese, there are so many different variations and combinations. Is it a white bun? Is it a wheat bun? Is it sour dough? Is it a pretzel roll? Does it have sesame seeds? Is it toasted? Is it plain? How about the patty? Is it beef? Is it a veggie burger? Is it real thin? Is it thick? Is it fats? Is it a double cheeseburger with two patties? What kind of cheese is it? Is it cheddar, American, gouda, what? Swiss? What other toppings are you gonna put on there? Ketchup, mustard, pickles, mayo, bacon, lettuce, tomato? So the idea here is that in order for a cheeseburger to be a cheeseburger, there are some basic things we have to have? The bun, the patty, and the cheese. But outside of those requirements, there's so many different unique ways to make a cheeseburger. The same is true of a story. You've got to have those basic elements of structure, beginning, middle, and end. And then within basic idea, you can create a ton of different variations, seemingly infinite variations. Are you using a lot of flashbacks? Are you frontloading the exposition at the beginning? Are you going to jump right into the action? How are you building the relationship? How much time are you going to spend on each idea in the story? Stories are built around major turning points. Story events, things that happen. In a feature film, we typically have three X, which is a nice way to break down beginning middle. At the end of each of those acts, there's a major turning point that changes the direction of the story. In a novel, there might be ten, 12, 15 major turning points in the story because a novel is longer and has more complexity to it. For a short film, your structure is probably going to be built around one story event. You don't want to overcomplicate your short film and try to squeeze a feature's worth of ideas into a short amount of time. So dealing with a single story event, single major turning point at the climax of your film is going to be much more compatible with a short film form than trying to pack in two, three, four turning points. So what you want to be thinking about as you're structuring your film, how do you start the story? Get into it as late in the events of the story as you possibly can. Start as as close to the ending as is realistic in order for the audience to understand what's happening and why. Hook the audience at the beginning. Introduce your characters, introduce the conflict, introduce theme, introduce all of those things, get us into it at the beginning, and start the ball rolling and show us how the protagonist gets hooked into whatever's happening. The middle is the meat of the story. That's where the character is really pursuing the goal, running into conflict, having to overcome obstacles, and learning lessons. The ending is where the hero has presumably learned whenever the lesson of the story is and is now going to achieve the goal of the film, or is going to tragically and definitively fail to achieve the goal of the film. The great screenwriter and playwright, Aaron Sorkin describes three structure this way. Act one, you chase the hero up a tree, Act two, you throw rocks at him. Act three, get him down or let him die try it. And I think even if we're not talking about that in terms of acts, We can still talk about that in terms of beginning, middle, and end. The beginning of the story, we have to put our hero in a predicament. In the middle of the story, we want to see our heroes struggle to get out of the predicament or to achieve whatever it is that they're trying to achieve. And at the end of the story, we see them reach the goal or literally or metaphorically die trying. 5. Let's Get Creative: Anybody can be creative. Creativity extends to many fields, not just in the arts, but in science, and business and mathematics. Creativity is such a fundamental part of the human experience. It's part of why we tell stories, and it's certainly part of how we tell stories. So where do you get ideas? I like the way that filmmaker David Lynch talks about this. David Lynch uses the analogy of going fishing. You're throwing lines into the water, and you're hoping to catch an idea that there are ideas all around you, and you're just trying to catch one. So how do you catch ideas? Where do they come Everybody has a different approach to this. Oftentimes in classroom discussions, I'll ask students, where do you get ideas? And some of the answers that come back are things like from reading books or from listening to music from my family and friends, from other movies that I've seen. And those are all perfectly fine answers. Although I would caution you about getting too many ideas from other films if you're writing a film because you don't want to just end up copying someone else. Chuck Jones, the great director of many classic Looney Tunes cartoons, Chuck Jones always emphasized the importance of literature of reading books and getting ideas, thinking about things from different points of view, learning new things, because the more we learn, the more pieces that we have to pull from and make connections to things, and those connections can form the basis for story ideas. Some people need a lot of activity to get creative, you know, like to people watch, go to a coffee shop and sit and listen to music and watch people go in and out. That gives ideas. Some people like to isolate themselves and close off in their office or in their home, their bedroom, their living room, go for a drive by yourself in the car. There are lots of different ways to do it. What you have to figure out is what's the appropriate setting for yourself? What setting is going to foster your creativity the most? And then are there things that you need in that setting? Do you need coffee? Do you need to have music playing? Do you need absolute silence? But even when you're not sitting down trying to be creative, there are still ways that you can foster creativity in yourself just on a day to day basis, looking for opportunities. There's drama all around us in real life. There are arguments? People get together romantically, people break up, people die. P lose their jobs, people get jobs. People find true love. People have children. People suffer great loss. There's oppression, there's racism, and there's all kinds of terrible things in this world and all kinds of wonderful things in this world. Any of those can serve as the foundation for a story idea. If you're willing to look for them. I like to combine different nuggets. If I have an idea for something and I'm having trouble cracking it as a story, and then I have another idea over here for something different, I'll go, what happens if I put those two things together? Does that turn into something? More often than not, it ends up turning into an interesting, unique story because I took two different things and make one new thing out of. The key thing is you have to be open to ideas coming in, and you have to be open to listening to them, and you have to be open to the bad ideas because the reality is not every idea you have is going to be a good idea. Not every idea is going to be worth writing into an actual story. If you're having trouble coming up with ideas, if you know you want to write something and you're really stumped and struggling to come up with a great idea Sometimes walking away from that can really help because now your mind has become free. You ever go to bed one night, struggling with an idea, and struggling with something that's challenging you and you wake up the next morning and suddenly you've got the idea. It's amazing how our brains will keep processing, even when we're not consciously thinking about things. One of the things I would really strongly recommend is play. Play a game, play a video game. Go out and take a walk. If you've got kids, play with your kids. All kinds of weird stuff comes out of the mouths of kids. Maybe something will spark an idea for you. Play is an important aspect of the creative process that I think in a lot of ways gets kind of conditioned out of us as we get older. Society deems it less appropriate for adults to play than for children to play. But if you want to be in a creative field, then we need to foster a mentality of creativity, and play is the perfect way to do that. Put yourself into the mind of your character. Start putting pieces together and see what happens. So sometimes if you're stumped, the thing to do is to just walk away from the script for a little while and go play. 6. Avoid Cliches: When you're first developing ideas for your story, I recommend write down all the ideas that you've got or keep a record of them somehow because you don't know what's going to click and what's not going to click. Something else I would caution you to do as you're fine tuning and actually writing an outline or structuring your story or whatever. Watch out for cliches. Watch out for the things that everybody has written into their stories that you've seen 1,000 times. The reality is that those are probably some of the first ideas that are going to come into your head because you've seen them so many times. How many films have you that open with an alarm clock glaring and the character waking up and going through their morning routine. Oh, my goodness, I've seen so many movies that do that. It's become an absurd cliche to introduce your character going through their morning routine. Come up with something more interesting, something creative, something surprising, something that's unique to your character and your story. How many times have you seen a character go into a bathroom and splash water on their face and then look meaningfully up into the mirror? I mean, we've seen that happen 1 million times. And what does it even mean? What's the character doing? They're contemplating something. Okay, I've never done that in my entire life. I've never walked into a bathroom, splashing water of my things and then contemplated something into my reflection. Maybe you have, but I see it in so many movies, and it drives me crazy. And every now and then it's used in a way that's actually effective, but so many times, it's just a thing that's there because the writer couldn't think of something more unique or original, or maybe the writer thought of something more unique and original, but a studio executive said, Let's do it this way because we've seen it, and we know it works. How about the fake out ending, right? We nothing that happened in the movie was real. It was all a dream or something going on inside their head 'cause they're crazy. Not only is it a cliche, but it also negates anything that's been at stake for the rest of the story. If the hero wakes up at the end, and the whole movie was a dream, then nothing that happened in the movie matters for the character. There's so many other cliches that people just get sick of seeing in short films, the suitcase full of money, Trop where people find a suitcase full of money. They don't know who it belongs to, but, you know, what do we do with it? Do we keep it? Do we divide it up, and then, of course, everybody starts turning on each other. Stories about hitmen. Oh, my goodness. I cannot tell you how many student short films I've seen about net. Come up with something more unique and more creative. One of the other things I see a lot in short films is just relentless grief and depression. Stuff about suicide. People want to make sf that's deep, and so they think, we got to go dark. We got to make it really, really aggressively dark. Okay, sure. Sometimes that can be effective, but sometimes it just feels like you're punishing the audience for watching your film. And it's also something that's just been done so so much. Everybody makes a movie about grief. Everybody makes a movie about depression. Yes. They're valid concepts. And if you can do something new with them, so something interesting or unique. Cool. Most of the films that do use those concepts, don't do anything unique or new or refresh with them. Oftentimes we see films with really ambiguous endings. You're not supposed to know what happened at the end. That just sounds like you didn't write an ending. There is room for some ambiguity. I'm a fan of endings with some ambiguity. I like a lot of the endings like that. But the thing is, we still need to have an ending. We still need to have some sense of satisfying closure, or else it feels like you just didn't write an ending. Films about film. There's nothing that artists like more in creating art about themselves. Oftentimes to create great art, we have to draw from our own personal lives. There are so many films about filmmaking. There are so many stories about writers and painters and musicians, but especially films about film. And look, I like a lot of those movies. There are so many films about filmmaking that I think are great films, singing in the rain, Ed Wood. But when you're making a short film, come up with something more unique. If you want your film to stand out, if you want people to notice your film, which again, is part of the point of making a short film, then come up with a story that is unique. And interesting and isn't just what you've seen in 1,000 other films. So as you're creating ideas, again, during the initial part of brainstorming, just grab all the ideas that you can. But when it comes to actually making the film and actually writing the script to make the film, be judicious and try to avoid the cliches that we've seen 1 million times because they aren't going to have the impact that you think they're going to have simply because we've already seen them so many times. 7. Prewriting: If you're new to this whole process, I would very strongly recommend doing some prewriting. Write some stuff down before you actually attempt to write the screenplay itself. Make an outline or a short synopsis, a summary of your story in prose form. That will help you to develop the structure and figure out what scenes you need. Is there progression that makes sense from the beginning to the end? Do the characters make choices? Are they learning things? All of that stuff. If you're working for a producer or a director, they might want to see an outline before you write the script. If there's a problem they see it in the outline form, you can fix it before you spend all of that time writing the actual screenplay. If you're doing a short film, it's going to be a pretty short outline. It might only be a couple of bullet points, maybe three to five bullet points. You're probably not going to have more than a page of pre writing. For a feature film, your outline potentially going to be a lot longer. It depends what kind of outline you're writing. I've written outlines for features that were a page long, I've written outlines that were five to ten pages long. Some writers will actually write their scenes on note cards. You have them laid down on a table or something, and you can put the cards in order and look at them and go, I think this scene actually should go in front of this scene first and move them around to get them in the order that you think is the best order. Everybody is going to use that method? There is no one size fits all for how to write anything. Every writer is different, every storyteller, every artist, every filmmaker, every painter, every sculptor, every musician. And we all go through the creative process differently. We have tricks that work for us that might not work for somebody else. And that's okay. In addition to an outline, what you might want to consider is creating what's called a log line. A log line is basically just a one sentence pitch for your film. Can you distill your idea down to one or two sentences, Max? Tell us what's the concept. It shouldn't be vague. I know that students are always pitching log lines like the character goes into a haunted house only to discover dark secrets. Okay? What are the dark secrets? What makes this different? What makes it unique? What makes it specific to this film? Who's the protagonist? What's the goal? Where's conflict coming from? Give us a little bit of a sense of the genre, the tone. Make sure you have a title. Always have a working title. You can always change it later. Titles get changed all the time. But make sure you have a title when you're writing your story, give it some kind of a you're going to pitch your story to a producer or a director or even if you want to pitch to the audience itself, you want to get them interested. Having a really solid log line can be incredibly valuable. I think the other reason it's valuable from a writing standpoint is it helps keep the writer focused. If you know what your log line is, if you know what the point of the story is, what the basic Fundamental idea is, it will help keep you on that path rather than going out a bunch of tangents into stuff that's not really relevant to your story. Let's say your log line is about a knight who has to go battle a dragon in order to get treasure. And you're writing your story, and somehow now you're doing this whole story line about the court jester trying to woo the princess. If you go back to the log line and go, Wait, what does this have to do with the log line? If my story is about the night fighting the dragon to get the treasure, then what does this whole thing with the court jester and the princess? What does that have to do with anything? And if you can't connect it, if it doesn't have anything to do with your main idea, Then it's probably something that superfluous and needs to go or that needs to be integrated into the story better. With a short film, that's especially important because you probably don't have subplots and side quests and things like that, in a short, it's probably very narrowly focused on one main idea. And so having a log line can be helpful for keeping you on track. So log lines and outlines are very helpful parts of the pre writing process. They can be used for pitching your ideas, but can also be used to help the writer simply organize and stay focused. 8. Speaking of Dialogue...: Dialogue is something that I feel like a lot of inexperienced writers really get hung up on. Something that I want to just preface this with is that dialogue is often something that doesn't get finalized until very late in the process. Early on, when you're doing your writing, when you're writing a screenplay, don't get too hung up on your dialogue. It's going to change. Is going to change in the revision process. And then down the road, if you're doing dramatic writing like a screenplay, where it's going to be performed by actors, the directors probably going to change things. The actors are going to change things. The screenwriters primary job is structure, figuring out who are the characters? What are the choices that they're going to make? How does it drive the action, and how am I going to organize all of that? That's what the writer's job in a screenplay really is fundamentally about. The dialogue is all window dressing. Dialogue is the suff that's there to help us understand why the characters are acting the way they are or what choices they're making. If somebody gets hired to do what's called a screenplay polish, or they're brought into maybe rewrite dialogue or write additional dialogue. Most of the time, you don't even get credit for that on screen in a movie. All of that to say, Yes, dialogue is important, but don't get hung up on that. Get your structure down, know who your characters are, make sure your characters are making proactive choices that move the narrative forward in pursuit of a goal. That is the fundamental job of the writer. But more often than not, when we write screenplays, we're writing dialogue for our characters. Now here's the thing about dialogue. Dialogue generally sounds like real natural conversation, but it's not. Dialogue is essentially conversation that has been focused with a purpose. So dialogue should sound authentic to the characters and the setting, but it's not just a rambling conversation. It should be revealing something about the characters, and it should be helping move the story forward. Now, I say authentic as opposed to realistic because What is realism? If we want to make a film that's completely realistic, that sounds very natural, it sounds like the way people really talk, great, we can do that. But not every film is realistic film. Some movies are very stylized. So my point here is to make your dialogue authentic. What sounds correct in a Western might not sound correct in an Elizabethan drama. What sounds correct in a really zany farce might not sound correct in a really intimate character drama. So what you want to think about is not necessarily realism, but authenticity. And that means you have to really listen to the way people talk. And you also have to think about the idea that if you're doing dramatic writing for a screenplay, a stage play, something like that, where it's going to be performed, that you're writing dialogue to be spoken. Writing dialogue for a novel is different from writing dialogue for the screen. In a novel, you have to write it in a way that the audience understands it by reading it in their heads. Screen, it has to sound authentic and natural coming from the character as it's being performed. Which means a lot of times we have more room for what's called subtext. Subtext is the thing that's being communicated without being directly communicated. For instance, if two characters are arguing over whose turn it is to do the dishes and are getting really upset about it, they're probably not really arguing about the dishes. They're probably arguing about something else, and it's coming out in this context. If I ask a student, did you do your homework last night? And the student says, Well, here's the thing. Alright, I already know. The answer is no. They've communicated something to me indirectly. That's subtext. In storytelling, especially in dramatic storytelling, we want our characters to use subtext. That's difficult to do. Subtext usually takes time to develop. And oftentimes when you don't have good subtext, you have what we call on the nose dialogue, where characters just say exactly what they're thinking. Hello. How are you? I'm fine. Thanks. How are you? I'm fine, as well. What a lovely day. Okay, that's boring. But if a character instead says, Hey, how's it going? And the other character says, Why do you want to know? Now there's some subtext in there. He's implying that there's some kind of antagonism between the two characters. That becomes more interesting to the audience. This is a process. Your script, especially in the first drafts, I probably gonna be full of on the nose dialogue. That's okay. As you do your rewrites, it will get better. One thing that I will strongly recommend when it comes to writing dialogue is to actually stage a reading of your script. Get some actors together, or if you can't get professional actors or experienced actors, get some friends together, and just read the script out loud. Hear how the words sound when they're spoken, and you'll start to hear the lines that sound corny or that sound on the nose. Even if they're not being delivered by experienced actors, even if they're being delivered Horne, you should still be able to hear Oh, man, that's really on the nose. They just said exactly what they meant there. And then you can go back and refine it. If you can't get friends together, then do it yourself. Just sit and read it out loud, maybe record it, and then go back and listen to it. It's usually better if you're not the one doing it though, because you want to listen, you want to be able to hear what they're saying and how they're saying it. My point here is that dialogue is difficult. It takes a lot of practice, and it takes a lot of insight into how humans speak and behave in order to write it well. And you have to remember that directors and actors are probably going to change your dialogue. So don't get too hung up on it. Make it as good as you can. 9. Write Your First Draft: All right. So you've been developing your story idea. You've written an outline, you've got a good premise. You've got a good log line. You've been thinking about your characters, you're avoiding cliches. Well, at some point, you have to just sit down and write the script. Writing the first draft of anything can be very intimidating, especially to an inexperienced writer, but even writers who have a lot of experience can feel intimidated looking at that blank page. There's nothing there. What am I going to do? How am I gonna fill it with words that mean something that tell a story? Well, here's what you need to do. Start putting words on the page. Seriously, it's that simple. Just start writing. Don't worry about it being bad or good. The reality is your first draft is probably gonna suck. And that's okay. That's normal. The American education system is very much built in this idea that you turn in your homework, you turn in the assignment, and you get your grade, and that's it, and you're done, and you move on. This idea that you've got to make it perfect the first time. And that's not really how this process works. That's not how any creative process works. It's not going to be perfect the first time. When we're shooting a film onset, we do multiple takes of a shot. We don't just go, Well, we got the first take good enough. Let's move on. We're going to do it until we get it right. Sometimes it takes two or three takes, sometime it takes seven or eight. The point here is that you can't make your script better if you don't have a script. So the goal with the first draft is simply to get the words on the page. Get to the end. I hear writers talk all the time about writers bloco, and wasn't right. I don't like it. I didn't know what to do. I couldn't figure out how to do this or that or whatever. And yeah, those are legitimate things. Getting stuck happens. The best way to get unstuck is to just plow forward, and it can be frustrating. It can be nerve racking. It can make you anxious, depressed, it can make you mad. I've been all of those things as I've been writing stuff. Sometimes you need to step away for a little while. Sometimes you need to impose deadlines on yourself if you don't have deadlines from the outside. The goal is to simply get it on the page. First drafts are going to be bad, and that is all right. It is normal. I've given you permission to write a bad script. It's okay. Let go of all that self judgment. We get in our own way all the time. Oh, it's not good enough. It's not good enough. I can't I can't keep going. It's not good enough. It doesn't have to be good enough. Get it written. When you're stuck, a technique that I like to use. If I've already been writing, this doesn't really work at the beginning of the script. But once you've gotten started, and you come back and you're looking at your script or whatever you're writing, and you're going, Alright, how do I move forward now? If you're stuck, what I like to do when I get into those positions, is I just go back and I re read everything I've written up to that point. Or if it's a longer piece, I might only read the last five or ten pages. But in a short You know, your total length is going to end up probably being around ten pages, maybe 15 if you're doing a longer short. But that's what I do when I get stuck. I just go back and read what I've written up to that point. And usually by the time I get to where I left off, I'm back in that zone. But sometimes you do have to step away for a moment. Sometimes you have to go play a game. I like to listen to music when I'm writing, and I might change the music and see if switching up a different playlist is going to help spark something. Whatever. Who knows? Read a book. Sometimes going back to those creative ideas we talked about earlier can be helpful if you get stuck in the middle. My point though, is that at some phase of this, you have to sit down and just put the words on the page. Take a break if you need a break. But always come back and finish it. If you're stuck and you feel like, I don't want to write this anymore. I want to do something else. That happens, but there's value in finishing the script. If all you have are, like, a dozen half written screenplays, and you don't have any finished screenplays, none of those are useful. If you have a finished script, now you can go back and do revisions, and you can make it better. 10. Writing is Rewriting: So the goal of the first draft is just to get the words on the page. To get your story laid out on the pages, action, dialogue, all of that. We have structure, beginning, middle, and end. We have characters pursuing goals. We've got conflict. We have a resolution at the end of the story. There's some thematic idea that's being communicated. We have scenes. We have characters doing things. It's there. As I've said before, first drafts are usually pretty terrible. Once you have it on the page, the real hard part starts, Rewriting. Rewriting is really what writing is all about. So how do we approach rewriting? When you start doing revisions, now you want to get feedback. You want to show your writing to other people. Now, that can be really intimidating for some writers. Oh, I don't want someone looking at my script and seeing how bad it is. So when it comes time to ask for feedback, make sure to go to someone you trust and make sure you go to someone who's going to actually give you feedback. Now, there are two extremes to this. There are the folks who are going to read your story and just say it's great because they're your friend or your family or whatever. They love you, and they're like, Yes, I love it. It's amazing. This is so good. Nice after a first draft. Sometimes because a first draft is so exhausting and difficult to write, sometimes I just want to pat on the back. But when it's time to actually do rewrites, that's not helpful. The other extreme is the person who just mercilessly tears your script apart and tells you how terrible all of it is. That's not helpful either. Folks who work in the creative arts understand that it's a difficult process. Why would you ever want to attack someone who's going through that if you know how difficult it is? Some people are just cruel for the sake of being cruel. To me, the best feedback is the feedback that is honest with you about what works and what doesn't work. Having someone who can read your script and say, Oh, this part works really well, I get what you're doing here. This is great. And then also saying, I don't know what this is supposed to be here. This feels like it's about this, but I think you're going for this other thing. I don't understand. It feels like there's a scene missing here. I don't know how we're getting from this point to this point. That's helpful. As the writer, you get to decide what changes you want to make. Unless, of course, you're writing for someone. If you're under contract, if you're writing a script for a producer who's hired you, then, you know, you pretty much have to make the changes that they want you to make because they're paying you. It's not really your script, it's their script. If you're writing a spec script, a script on speculation of getting it sold or produced. Most of the time short film scripts are spec scripts. In that case, you get to decide what you want to do. You have to be able to use discernment, though. A lot of times inexperienced writers start getting feedback and the walls go up. Well, you don't know what you're talking about. That's not what I was trying to do. No, no, you're missing the whole point. Yeah, they are missing the point. Because you didn't write the point in such a way that they got it. You've got to be able to listen to your audience. But also use discernment to understand which feedback is the feedback worth listening to and which feedback maybe isn't worth listening to. If you show your script to ten people, and all ten of them tell you that some part of the script isn't working, then you probably ought to think about fixing it. You have to use that discernment. You have to be able to judge whether the feedback is useful or not. But in doing so, don't just put up the walls. It can be difficult not to be really precious about your work. Oh, I spent so much time writing that line of dialogue. I can't cut that. No, I spent weeks writing this scene, and now you think I should just get rid of it. Sometimes in order to make your story better, you've got to get rid of the pieces that don't work. That's part of the process. Letting go. You want to make your script as good as you can make. That means making tough choices sometimes. And, of course, as soon as you make those changes, you're going to see a whole bunch of other problems pop up and now you're going to make those changes, which then make other problems evident. This is why oftentimes with a screenplay, you'll go through, five or six drafts or ten drafts, or even 20 drafts. This is also why it's a good idea to do pre writing because then you can figure out a lot of the fundamental structural issues before you spend all that time writing out dialogue and action. Of course, your first draft is going to be rough. But in the rewrite process, get trusted readers to give you feedback. Use discernment when choosing what to listen to and what not to listen to. Don't just go for a pat on the back and say everything's great. Make the hard choices, get rid of stuff if it's not working, rewrite stuff if it's not working. Don't be afraid to move things around. It's not just about proof reading when we're talking about revisions, not just adding commas where they need to be commas or fixing spelling errors. It's about fixing more fundamental problems. But that's how you write a great script. 11. Closing: All right, we've reached the end of our course on how to write a script for your short film. Hopefully through this process, you've gained a greater understanding of what you need to do to actually create a screenplay for a short film. Using structure, making sure that you have goals and a clear finish line that the hero can attain through active pursuit of the goal, overcoming conflict along the way. Using dialogue, avoiding cliches, getting creative ideas that are unique to short films as opposed to feature films, writing your first draft, which is going to be rough and then going through the revision process. Wish you the best of luck with your short film. Hopefully you can write something that you're proud of. If it turns out poorly, that's okay. You can always write another script. There are so many ideas out there. And if this is something that you really are driven to do, you're going to find a way to do it regardless of whatever I'm saying. So good luck with your scripts. Hopefully you can get them made into films as well. Okay, I'm Joshua Corte. Thank you for watching this course.