If you’ve ever had to undertake any sort of project, once you’ve overcome the blank page you know that preparation and organization can save your life when it comes to getting through to the end. The script is your blueprint that you can show to friends or to those financially fortunate individuals who can help you bring your idea to the screen, so it’s important to have a clear, organized layout that just about anybody can look at. A properly formatted script is almost a must if you’re going to show it to a potential investor, or if you’re serious about entering competitions that can win you some coin and help finance your project.

Script as the gateway to getting money and Interest in your project

There are a number of great websites where you can submit your script and have it compete for prize money but my favourite is an organization called the Wildsound Festival. They have a site, where for a fee; you can submit a completed film or your screenplay. Your screenplay then has the potential to be read by professional actors and viewed by film investors and producers who could be your future partners in getting the money required to get your project off the ground. We have to be realistic though, film is a competitive industry and Wildsound accepts submissions from everywhere, so if you’re a student, you might want to check out the Student Shorts Film Festival. This festival was actually started by a friend of mine and his student buddies and has grown successfully over the last 8 years, specializing in student submissions. More on festivals in the next blog…

Back to Basics: GET ORGANIZED!

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. Not only can a million things go wrong when you actually DO get the wonderful opportunity to shoot your project, but there are obstacles that need to be resolved at the earliest stages, one of them being writing the script. Notice how I didn’t say writing a GOOD script. The ‘goodness’ of your story will depend on your own creative juice and ability to write and is largely dependent on whose reading it. Just because someone says your idea sucks, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t plow ahead and believe in it. (I smell another blog coming…)

One thing that IS pretty standard is putting your script into a format that is readable and adheres to the normal format. This will depend if you’re writing a TV, Theatre, Music Video or Film script, as they all have their own format and for good reason, each media has its own special requirements. They ALL need to communicate these requirements to anyone who is going to get involved. Putting yourself on a need-to-know basis is fine, but it doesn’t always jive well with others.

GET ORGANIZED, FOR FREE!

There’s a great site I came upon that offers a program called Celtx. This has ready-made, feature-rich templates to make screenplays, storyboards, schedules and sticky-notes that you can attach to your screenplay when you have a moment of inspiration that you need to get down fast. It’s available in over 15 languages and they have a project sharing site where you can post your script, storyboards and so on, so other people can comment on them.

Just check out this one guy’s project about a therapy group for monsters. Celtx supports Windows, OSX and even Linux for the avant-gardes out there.

There are a lot of professional scriptwriting programs like Final Draft, which can cost an arm and a leg for a student, but Celtx gets the job done and it’s free. The industry is pretty unforgiving when it comes to deviation from the standard, so in this case, you might have to buckle down and find a way to manage your story and break it down in a format that someone can read and say ‘I get it’.

Most festivals require you to have a properly formatted script, so it literally PAYS to become pretty good at writing one that can still communicate the ideas and emotions of your inspired story before you even think about finding any kind of money to make it a reality.