You probably have several ideas for a movie. And that's why you're here. Now taking this course. It's time to take one of these ideas your best idea, and to flesh it out. You need to know more about it and the people involved before we start to committed to a script. Before beginning a script, the writer needs to know as much as possible about his characters.
He needs to know what makes them tick. They need to live and breathe for him before they can live and breathe for the audience. To do this, we need to ask ourselves many questions about the setup. The conflict and the resolution of our movie asks these questions about your hero. Who is he or she In this simple question, you should include as many aspects of the personality, just as if he or she were a living person. Because for the audience, they will be.
What does your hero want? How badly do they want it? And why do they want it? What do they have to do to get it? Do they have the skills and the courage to get it? And what do they need to learn before they have a chance of getting it?
This is important and relates to the character internal scenery, as described in the classic character arc. In the central 50% of the movie, the conflict phase, we need to ask ourselves, who is the villain? let's describe him. What does the villain want? What is his goal? How does the villain oppose the hero?
His goal should oppose the goal of the main character. We need to identify the heroes weaknesses. How does the villain use these weaknesses? to exploit the character and try to defeat him? How does the conflict and the tension increase towards the climax as it should? And lastly, how does the hero overcome his major weakness and change himself in order to win and defeat the villain in the resolution phase, which includes the climax, what makes the hero keep battling on setback after setback defeat after defeat Pete, he just carries on.
When and how does a hero realize he has to learn something an important lesson and change internally before he can overcome the final challenge? What are the moral choices he has to make to succeed in the quest. Now you have a more concrete idea of the points we just covered. We can start to describe the movie script in more detail in the form of beats. A beat is a sequence of scenes, each lasting between two to three minutes. The description of a movie script in terms of beats might look like this.
Started a beat one. Introduce the main characters that focus on the hero and the set Of course, specify who and where they are. Use the initial dialogue and action to reveal the partial backstory. show his links within the associates. Because support characters are very important for a movie script. What does a hero want?
He reveals or discovers very close to the start of the movie, a need or a desire or he has a problem that needs to be solved. Make the audience aware of what the hero needs to learn or how to change something in himself to get his goal. Bear in mind, he may not even know this himself yet. He becomes confused and moves in wrong directions. The hero starts to act to reach his goal. But he hasn't learned that important lesson yet.
His approach is wrong. He meets setbacks and becomes confused and dispirited. Number five, the villain, of course, has a goal, which is opposite to the heroes. So he opposes him more and more intensely as the script develops. This is a point a major setback for the hero, he still hasn't learned his lesson. The action intensifies as the villain opposes even more intensely the hero's friends desert him at this point, and things are really bad.
At page seven, the rising conflict reaches a climax. The hero is almost spent and has no hope. reaching his goal final defeat is staring him in the face. The hero summons all of his resources for a final all out attempt. The hero wins in the end, because he realizes there's more to life than he thought. In the last two lectures, I talked quite extensively about the basic structure, the formula for a story that can be applied to a movie script, and that will be followed and will be found appealing by an audience.
The audience will identify with the characters, they will see the plot events as important to the character's development, and they want to keep watching to see what happens. The tension and the conflict mount towards the climax and eventually the resolution towards the end of the film. Now this formula is well tested and should be used, particularly if you're a new writer. Now, eventually, you will want your script to be read by a professional. In your heart of hearts, you want your script to be read, and if possible, made into a movie. When a professional reader takes a look at your script, he'll be on the lookout for two things.
First of all, a creative aspect and secondly, the script format. In the setup phase of the script, which is the first 10 to 20 pages, he will find all he needs to know about whether to carry on or rejected. In those first pages, the reader will be checking the elements included in the setup phase of your story. If the elements of main character introduction, setting and back history introduced by dialogue are not there He will probably not bother to read the rest of the script. Likewise, if the script format and directions are not the industry standard, he probably will put the script down and forget it. In the next lecture, we're going to look at the subject of script format and directions, first of all, in a broad sense, and then we'll look at more detailed explanations of how you need to describe your script.