Advice — christopher riley

We've all heard the warning against overwriting our screenplays by including too much camera direction or too many slug lines. We worry about getting it wrong, because we're professionals. Or at least we want our scripts to make us look that way. A little knowledge about how the pros use shot headings will go a long way toward equipping us to make a professional impression with every page we write. More than that, it will empower us to harness the power of shot headings to propel readers through pages that would otherwise bog down - or might not get read...

Before a film or television script can fulfill its destiny in front of cameras and on screens around the world, it must first succeed as a piece of literature, a document that captivates the reader before it delights the viewer. Since film and television are collaborative media, the first job of a script is to attract collaborators: producers, agents, executives, directors, actors. These readers are a script's primary audience. How to captivate them? A fresh story driven by compelling characters doesn't hurt. But neither does a style of screenwriting that gets itself out of the way and allows the story...