Act I is Done!
So it looks like I've finally gotten Golden Gate, my first feature film script, off the ground and running, with Act I successfully in the can. Though I'm afraid this won't be any kind of final draft.
Robert McKee, author of the excellent Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and Principles of Screenwriting says for a 2 hour movie, the standard structure is three acts or more, 40 to 60 scenes. Since one page of a script equals approximately one minute of actual screen time, a standard script size would be, for all three acts or more, approximately 120 pages.
What does that have to do with my film, Golden Gate? Well, it might have to do with the fact my first act is approximately 35 scenes and, um... 68 pages. If you do the calculations, and all three acts were of equal lengths, this would clock me in at a 204 pages and almost 3.5 hours of screen time. So I'm skipping my Boogie Nights and Titanic, and going straight for Gone With the Wind. Good luck to you and your bladder without an intermission :-).
Not being the kind of person with the audacity to write an epic his first time out, and barring the possibility for an HBO original series, a la The Wire and The Sopranos- it's a hard truth that there's going to be some serious cutting once the whole script is written. That said, it might be easier than it initially looks, since each act is almost NEVER of equal length, because of this little thing called "pacing." If every act were the same length, we'd all probably walk out of half of the movies we'd go to see in the theater.
With the exception of maybe Return of the King, generally the final act is the shortest, and the middle acts are the longest. There's also a very intricate science to pacing, not to mention average scene lengths- which could also make or break a movie. The average scene length for most movies (per Robert McKee) is somewhere around 2.5 minutes.
To test this principle, I went through some of my favorite DVDs and actually wrote down each of the scene lengths and took an average. Since the book was published (in 1997), and cites a lot of examples from the 80s, average scene lengths actually seem to have gotten longer, sometimes by half a minute and in some cases by a minute or more. For instance, the first Matrix has a 3.5 min average scene length, but it hardly feels like a slow movie. Movies themselves seem to be on average getting progressively longer, which helps explain this trend towards longer average scene length. That said, for movies that float around the 2 hour mark, McKee's rule still holds pretty accurately.
So where does Golden Gate clock in? Around 2.67 average minutes per scene for Act I. Not bad. Which can mean only one thing- my pacing is decent, but there are just too many scenes. Once the whole script is written I think it will become pretty clear which ones will end up on the proverbial cutting room floor, but only time will tell.
Mechanics, statistics, and principles of screenwriting aside, writing the first act has been one of the hardest things I've ever done, but simultaneously one of the most fun. All the story outlines and character descriptions I defined previously were only loosely followed, to be perfectly honest, ceding instead to something that's akin to chaos phenomena. It's an odd feeling, to put characters into a situation together and to see how they react to each other. It's almost as if they are living, breathing beings- the unpredictability of their actions comes out in their interactions with each other.
The script can eerily seem to write itself after a certain point. Scenes that I loosely define end up completely different, which causes ripple effects throughout the yet to be written subsequent acts. This is really exciting to me, because not only is the progression of the narrative becoming more interesting, but the climax of the narrative also becomes more and more clear, making my drive to finish the script even stronger.
So I'm going to take about a week or so off to reorganize, as things tend to fall into disarray during a project crunch like this. Also going to resume my Great Ideas of Philosophy (audio) Class, which I'm currently on lecture 45 of 60. I took a short hiatus from that for the last two weeks so I could finish Act I. Lots of interesting characters I'm meeting. I never thought I'd say it, but I ended up being a serious fan of Immanuel Kant. I battled him in college but never got very far. Now he and I are pals- go figure!
Robert McKee, author of the excellent Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and Principles of Screenwriting says for a 2 hour movie, the standard structure is three acts or more, 40 to 60 scenes. Since one page of a script equals approximately one minute of actual screen time, a standard script size would be, for all three acts or more, approximately 120 pages.
What does that have to do with my film, Golden Gate? Well, it might have to do with the fact my first act is approximately 35 scenes and, um... 68 pages. If you do the calculations, and all three acts were of equal lengths, this would clock me in at a 204 pages and almost 3.5 hours of screen time. So I'm skipping my Boogie Nights and Titanic, and going straight for Gone With the Wind. Good luck to you and your bladder without an intermission :-).
Not being the kind of person with the audacity to write an epic his first time out, and barring the possibility for an HBO original series, a la The Wire and The Sopranos- it's a hard truth that there's going to be some serious cutting once the whole script is written. That said, it might be easier than it initially looks, since each act is almost NEVER of equal length, because of this little thing called "pacing." If every act were the same length, we'd all probably walk out of half of the movies we'd go to see in the theater.
With the exception of maybe Return of the King, generally the final act is the shortest, and the middle acts are the longest. There's also a very intricate science to pacing, not to mention average scene lengths- which could also make or break a movie. The average scene length for most movies (per Robert McKee) is somewhere around 2.5 minutes.
To test this principle, I went through some of my favorite DVDs and actually wrote down each of the scene lengths and took an average. Since the book was published (in 1997), and cites a lot of examples from the 80s, average scene lengths actually seem to have gotten longer, sometimes by half a minute and in some cases by a minute or more. For instance, the first Matrix has a 3.5 min average scene length, but it hardly feels like a slow movie. Movies themselves seem to be on average getting progressively longer, which helps explain this trend towards longer average scene length. That said, for movies that float around the 2 hour mark, McKee's rule still holds pretty accurately.
So where does Golden Gate clock in? Around 2.67 average minutes per scene for Act I. Not bad. Which can mean only one thing- my pacing is decent, but there are just too many scenes. Once the whole script is written I think it will become pretty clear which ones will end up on the proverbial cutting room floor, but only time will tell.
Mechanics, statistics, and principles of screenwriting aside, writing the first act has been one of the hardest things I've ever done, but simultaneously one of the most fun. All the story outlines and character descriptions I defined previously were only loosely followed, to be perfectly honest, ceding instead to something that's akin to chaos phenomena. It's an odd feeling, to put characters into a situation together and to see how they react to each other. It's almost as if they are living, breathing beings- the unpredictability of their actions comes out in their interactions with each other.
The script can eerily seem to write itself after a certain point. Scenes that I loosely define end up completely different, which causes ripple effects throughout the yet to be written subsequent acts. This is really exciting to me, because not only is the progression of the narrative becoming more interesting, but the climax of the narrative also becomes more and more clear, making my drive to finish the script even stronger.
So I'm going to take about a week or so off to reorganize, as things tend to fall into disarray during a project crunch like this. Also going to resume my Great Ideas of Philosophy (audio) Class, which I'm currently on lecture 45 of 60. I took a short hiatus from that for the last two weeks so I could finish Act I. Lots of interesting characters I'm meeting. I never thought I'd say it, but I ended up being a serious fan of Immanuel Kant. I battled him in college but never got very far. Now he and I are pals- go figure!
posted by Polymathic Resonance at
8:23 PM
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