simon wright
Tuesday 22nd February 2011 6:11pm [Edited]
London
477 posts
Declan/Simon, is it okay to sent the PDF in a screenplay format for now? The Celtx theatre format seems to be not as neat compared to the examples in this thread, and when trying to re-jig it, OpenOffice writer is making even more of a dog's dinner of it.
Certainly is OK. You can send us Word docs, Celtx, Pages, Neo Office, Final Draft (.fdr not .fdx as we haven't upgraded to FD8). About the only thing we can't open are Movie Magic Screenwriter files.
Just make sure we can read it.
I can't stress this enough; if you're worried about formatting for us you're worrying about the wrong things. It's hard enough to write something that is funny, original, marketable and stageable as it is. Those are the things to focus on. We don't obsess about page count, font, layout etc. Just MAKE US LAUGH AND MAKE SURE WE CAN STAGE IT.
Having said that, it's probably not a good idea to do as one writer did and indicate every time who someone is talking to. In a duologue:
BILL (to Ben) How are you?
BEN (to Bill) Fine. And you?
BILL (to Ben) Alright.
It was an exhausting read. And the dialogue was worse.
Another bizarre thing that's turned up surprisingly often is the writer who writes dialogue and action in the same style:
BILL Have you seen Ben? He puts the teapot on the table.
Sorry about this Bill and Ben stuff, but my brains have turned to mush.
Is it possible to include children, is we hear them on a recording but don't actually see them?
We strongly advise people to use sound f/x and voice-over. It's the most economical way to indicate a scene change. For example if you need the audience to know that our bare stage is now an airport departure lounge you can either cover that with clunky dialogue, or simply have an announcement that flight F939 to Frankfurt is boarding at gate 17.
In this particular case we'd really need to know how much dialogue you want the kids to carry and how old they're supposed to sound.