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The short script

Started by JayDici, 24 February, 2015, 12:16:22 AM

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JayDici

Growing up in Canada I grew up on longer form books, but these days I've been struggling to wrap my head around 4-8 page scripts. Does anyone have any hints or good rule of thumbs for it?

The Legendary Shark

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M.I.K.

Setup, premise, (usually unexpected) punchline.

The Enigmatic Dr X

Let the art do the exposition.
Lock up your spoons!

Emp

It can be a difficult thing to master. As mentioned before brevity and letting the art do the talking are the secrets. The mighty Sharky helped me out at the start (thank you sir), pointing out where i was going wrong and steering me in the right direction. Now, we will differ in our approach but the same rules are true....keep speech and captions to a minimum, the art drives the story. Write it out the way you want and then look at it and see how you can condense 3 frames into 1. Some things will be lost but as you try to edit the story other things and ideas will appear.

JayDici

Thanks for the notes guys. This is really not an area I know really well. I've done a couple of 8 pagers, but shorter than that always stumps me.

Richmond Clements

Quote from: JayDici on 06 March, 2015, 05:20:14 PM
Thanks for the notes guys. This is really not an area I know really well. I've done a couple of 8 pagers, but shorter than that always stumps me.

Take one of those 8 pagers and turn it into a 4 pager. Think about things like combining panels so that there's more than one thing happening at a time, or communicating some information through (non-expositional) dialogue.

The Legendary Shark

Also, there's always at least one panel you (I) put in simply because it's cool or clever. Cut it.
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Panels with characters just stood around doing exposition at one another. Cut them.
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If your story still makes sense without a particular panel, cut it.
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It's also good to plan - here's a little trick I often use; for a five (eg.) page strip, use five pages of a small notebook. On each page, you have six short sentences, each describing a vital plot development. Tune, refine and rearrange those sentences into a pleasing, flowing shape.  Turn those sentences into panel descriptions, merging as many as you can. Put the dialogue in last. Then write the script.
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People think writing a movie/comic script is easier than writing a short story or a novel because fewer words are used; but the opposite is true. The short story or novel writer can use as many words as they like to get their ideas across but the script writer must cut and cut and cut again to get the greatest impact and meaning from the fewest words.
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Cut. Combine. Cut. Condense. Cut.
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It's taken me a long time to learn this, and I'm still not great at it (as Rich will attest!), but I'm getting there.
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I hope.
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