One way of making sure you don’t have to think
about format the whole time, enabling you to concentrate
exclusively on the creative side of things, is to create tabs,
macros and templates to take care of this
task for you. There are also numerous screenplay programs
on the market (my favourite being Movie Magic
Screenwriter) to help you do the job, as well as
shareware plug-ins such as The
Screenwriter's Toolkit, Screenplay
Styler, Magicscript,
Digiscript, all of which are
for MS Word, and Screenwright
for WordPerfect. In my opinion,
the only one which comes close to dedicated program is
called ScreenPro. It can
be ordered directly from its creator,
Jack
Passarella.
Font
Courier 12 point 10 pitch. In MSWord for
Windows this font is called "Courier New".
Never use italics. Never use bold.
Paper Size
Letter (27.94cm x 21.59cm)
Pagination
Top right, usually followed by a full stop.
Margins
| Vertical |
Top 2.5cm
Bottom 2.5cm-3cm |
| Action/Sluglines |
Left 3.5cm
Right 3.5-4cm |
| Character Names |
9cm from left |
| Dialogue |
6.5cm from left
7.5cm from right |
| Parentheticals |
7cm from left |
Alignment
Left (i.e. straight left edge and wavy right).
Although I have tried to make the examples in this
guide look like the real thing, some parts may appear
differently in different browsers, so you should always
follow what you read rather than what you see.
|
