» Posts Tagged ‘screenplay’
Scriptnotes, the podcast from screenwriters John August and Craig Mazin that we’ve featured on nofilmschool a number of times (and also happens to be one of the most popular podcasts about that topic), is running a challenge for listeners to submit three pages of their original work, to be read and critiqued on an upcoming podcast. Click below for more details and learn how to enter! More »
Pros & Cons of Amazon Storyteller, a Free Online Storyboarding Tool from Amazon Studios
Screenwriting by its very nature demands a visual writing style. The words on the page have to conjure up images in the reader’s mind if the script were turned into a film. Simultaneously, a screenplay must be economical with its language, using only the words necessary to tell the story. These two requirements, visual and economical, are two of the main reasons why storytelling in the screenplay format can be so difficult. Inevitably, production teams will need to visualize the screenplay, and that’s usually where storyboards come in (though plenty of us are inept at drawing). That’s why Amazon Studios has introduced a new tool to speed up the storyboarding process called Amazon Storyteller – and it’s “free,” but there’s a catch (or four or five). More »
If you’ve ever wondered why screenplays are formatted in such a strict and precise manner, or thought, “When did the first filmmakers start using scripts,” or wanted a clear rundown of the first decades of the history of cinema — well — you’re in luck. Not only can you learn the origins of the screenplay and the basics of “The History of Film 101″ (arguably 102) for free without buying textbooks, but you can do it all in less than 15 minutes. More »
Sundance Hit Coming to a Theatre Near You…With a New Title (Or Why Movie Titles Matter)
For those of us who eagerly await the release of festival hits in theatres near us, we track film reviews during their festival runs and make our lists of must-see films in the hopes that at least one screen nearby will get a limited run of the festival darlings later in the year (or even next year). So, if you live in New York or Los Angeles, and you’ve been waiting to see the Sundance comedy favorite Toy’s House (because of our in-depth interview with its screenwriter Chris Galletta, naturally), you’d be forgiven for not realizing that the film already opened in very limited release this weekend, albeit as the movie now known as The Kings of Summer. This Sundance breakout certainly isn’t the only film that stood out at this year’s festival to get a new title, nor is this a new trend altogether, which made me ponder this thought: why do movie titles matter so much? More »
5 More Award-Winning Screenwriters Discuss How They Approach Their Craft
Back in March, we posted five award-winning screenwriters discussing how they approach their craft. Personally, I find great value in hearing from successful professional screenwriters, learning about their strengths and weaknesses, finding out what works and doesn’t work for them as they work on their screenplays. After originally posting about five award-winning screenwriters, we naturally had to follow that up with five more award-winning screenwriters discussing how they approach their craft because everybody loves a sequel (right?). Grab a snack, sit back and learn from screenwriters Geoffrey Fletcher, Nat Faxon & Jim Rash, Sofia Coppola, Pedro Almodóvar, and Charlie Kaufman as they share their thoughts about crafting stories, writing screenplays and navigating the business. More »
After the success of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick was planning on shooting a film about Napoleon Bonaparte, but financing fell through and he was forced to make the comparatively low-budget A Clockwork Orange. An exhaustive book of preproduction materials was published in 2011 for the unfinished epic about Napoleon’s life, but for the curious, the screenplay and an insanely detailed production memo are available online for free, giving the world a glimpse into what might have been. Check out a detailed analysis and read it for yourself below. More »
Warner Bros. Hires Screenwriter from Black List Service, What Does This Mean for the Rest of Us?
Earlier this week, both Deadline and The Wrap reported news that Warner Bros. hired new screenwriter Richard Cordiner for a two-film blind deal. The first script Cordiner will write for the studio will be Spacesuit, based on the book by Nicholas de Monchaux that tells the true story of bra designers from Playtex who designed the spacesuit for Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to walk on the moon (which leads to the natural realization that, yes, all you MTV Music Video Award winners, your trophies were essentially designed by Playtex). What is more interesting about the Warner Bros. deal with Cordiner is the writer was discovered and signed by his agent and managers via The Black List service after his uploaded script The Shark Is Not Working about the making of Jaws made the rounds in Hollywood. This is great news for Cordiner and The Black List service, but what does it mean for the rest of us? More »
Five Screenplay Transition Tips to Improve Your Script from John August & Craig Mazin
When we initially put together our stories for our screenplays, we typically think about all of our major story beats, jotting them down on notecards or writing bulletpoints in outlines. Everything looks great on our whiteboards or corkboards or cinema displays and we’re ready to dive into the screenplay itself. We come to the end of our first scene and realize something is missing. Transitions are the glue that holds our screenplays together, the peanut butter between our scene-size crackers, the chewed-up gum in our MacGyver writing contraptions (alright, I’m trying too hard here). Without transitions, we’re left with a bunch of scenes and no cohesive story. On a recent episode of the Scriptnotes podcast, John August and Craig Mazin offer the following five tips on screenplay transitions to help you keep the reader and the viewer engaged in your story. More »
Win-Win Redux: Donate to Heart Walk, Get Your Screenplay Read by a Professional Manager
Last year, we posted about a great opportunity for screenwriters to donate to a great cause and get their screenplay read by a professional manager in return. If you missed your chance last year, screenwriter Joe Nienalt and Benderspink manager Daniel Vang are back to help Joe raise money for the 2013 Heart Walk. Last year, with Daniel’s promise to read screenplays from Joe’s Heart Walk donors, Joe raised almost $45,000 for the American Heart Association (up from over $8,000 the previous year). Over the past two years, two writers and a writing team got representation as a result of Daniel reading their scripts through the fund drive. Joe appreciated our nofilmschool post about his Heart Walk campaign so much last year, he linked to it from his own post to help people understand why they should donate. Joe reached out to us again this year to help him spread the word, and we’re happy to do so. To find out how you can help a good cause and your own screenwriting career, check out the details below: More »
Literally thousands of people write screenplays every year, and for many of these writers, these screenplays are likely their very first efforts at screenwriting. For screenwriting newbies, several books exist that cover the basics of screenplay format and story structure, and more and more screenplays are available online for new writers to read and study. If you’re just getting started with screenwriting or if you have written one or two screenplays and want to hone your craft, a new online course from lynda.com, Screenwriting Fundamentals by Mark Tapio Kines, may be just want you need. And the best part is you can check it out for free (and any other lynda.com course) with a 7-day trial subscription. More »
Screenwriting Meets Simplicity: A Review of the New Screenwriting App Slugline
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the introduction of Slugline, a new Mac app for screenwriting from Stu Maschwitz and Clint Torres of Act Focused Media. The concept behind Slugline is to keep the app simple so screenwriters can focus on the writing. Slugline uses Fountain, the screenwriting markup language designed by Maschwitz with screenwriter John August, and adds a slight veneer of GUI to separate it from a plain text editor. Thanks to a review copy provided by Act Focused Media, I’ve had some time to work with Slugline to provide nofilmschool readers with a more in-depth review of this new Mac app. More »
If you write your screenplays in Final Draft (like me) but didn’t have an iPad when Final Draft Writer originally debuted at the sale price of $30 (like me), but now you have an iPad and wish you could’ve gotten Final Draft Writer for the cheaper price (like me) so you’ve waited for a sale (like me), you’re in luck. Until May 15th, Final Draft Writer is available for $30, 40% off the regular price of $50. Need a little more info about the app? Check out our recap below from when the app originally debuted. More »
Paint by Numbers? Hollywood Rewriting Scripts Based on Statistical Analysis to Boost Box Office
If there is one axiom about screenwriting for the studios that holds true above all others, it may be this: your screenplay will be rewritten. If you’re lucky (depending on how you define “lucky”), you’ll get to rewrite the script yourself. You may even get fired off your original screenplay only to be rehired a few drafts down the road to fix what other screenwriters have changed, like screenwriter Michael Arndt on his Oscar-winning Little Miss Sunshine, according to his introduction to the published version of the script. Studios want to take the guesswork out of rewrites to figure out which changes will lead to the biggest return on their investments. Enter the world of statistical analysis and script consultants who make script notes purely based on the numbers. More »
Time's Up, Pencils Down: 2013 Academy Nicholl Fellowships Final Deadline is May 1
By now, if you’re planning on submitting a screenplay to the Academy Nicholl Fellowships, hopefully you’ve already done so. If not, your time to submit is quickly dwindling. The final deadline for the 2013 Academy Nicholl Fellowships is 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time, Wed. May 1, but don’t wait until the last minute. Get your screenplay submitted now so you’re not freaking out about whether your submission made it into the system on time. Check out the details on how to submit below. More »
Last month, I wrote about the retail version of screenwriting Mac App Highland from Quote-Unquote Apps, based on the Fountain markup language. The major selling point for Highland is its ability to melt PDFs into Fountain-based text files that can be edited and exported as either formatted PDFs or Final Draft (.fdx) files. Today, Slugline arrives, a new screenwriting Mac App now available for purchase that is also based on Fountain. What is Slugline’s major selling point for screenwriters? Simplicity. More »
Finish That Rewrite: 2013 Academy Nicholl Fellowships Regular Deadline is April 10
This is a combination PSA/light a fire under your a** post to make sure you are writing, rewriting, and rewriting some more to get your screenplay ready for the Academy Nicholl Fellowships regular deadline of Apr. 10. I’ll be honest, my latest script will not be ready by that deadline (needs a little more seasoning – okay, a lot more seasoning), but if you’ve been diligent, hopefully your script will be ready. Otherwise, it will cost you another fifteen bucks for the late deadline on May 1. Check out current stats on this year’s competition and details on how to apply below. More »
Know What Your Screenwriting Audience Wants: The Business of Spec Scripts
Many of us here on NFS will write screenplays for our own films that we plan to make ourselves. That said, it’s always good to know which scripts are selling in the marketplace: 1) to know what movies may be coming to a theatre near you soon so your script is different (or better); 2) to know the styles and genres of scripts that studios and financiers are buying should you want to sell your own spec; and 3) to know who represents and manages writers of scripts like your own to help you find representation. To shed some light on the spec script market, Scott Myers at Go Into The Story has been running a weekly series on this very topic, covering the history of the spec script market, the buyers of spec scripts, the spec screenwriter-representation relationship and more. More »
The Nine-Year Overnight Success Story of the 'Olympus Has Fallen' Screenwriters
Working on the outside looking in when you are an aspiring screenwriter can be a grind. Certainly, there are moments when you may wonder if you are making progress toward your ultimate goal of getting a screenplay turned into a feature film. If you don’t put in the hours on your writing, however, your craft will never rise to the level necessary to make a sale or get a greenlight. Those hours, in the case of screenwriter Creighton Rothenberger, started at 4 a.m. before his corporate job for several years until 2002 when he won the Academy Nicholl Fellowship. After conceiving Olympus Has Fallen in 2003 and writing it with his wife, Katrin Benedikt, this screenwriting duo spent another nine years writing specs before selling this particular script in 2012 and seeing it hit the big screen last weekend. Watch them tell their story below. More »
Highland Screenwriting Mac App Now Available, Free to Try and $10 Through March
After a little more than a year of beta testing, Highland, the screenwriting app from Quote-Unquote Apps, is now available for purchase in the Mac App Store. To promote the retail version, Highland is available for $10, half off its list price of $20, through the end of March. Highland lets writers write scripts in plain text and converts files between PDF, Final Draft (.fdx) and Fountain, a screenwriting markup language developed by Quote-Unquote Apps. To find out more about how Highland works and to get a free demo, check out the video and details below. More »
Speaking of opportunities to further your screenwriting career, screenwriting labs that work with writers extensively on their screenplays as well as introduce them to professional screenwriters and producers as advisors are worth exploring. At NFS we’ve discussed the Sundance Institute Screenwriters Lab, perhaps the most well-known of the screenwriting labs here in the U.S. For writers living in the Los Angeles area, Film Independent’s Screenwriting Lab offers a five-week program that meets two to three evenings a week in September and October to help writers improve their current screenplays as well as their overall craft. Plus, Film Independent helps lab fellows advance their careers with the help and guidance of film professionals. Check out the details below, but take note: the submission deadline is Apr. 1, 2013. More »
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