Script- First Draft and Keeping on track.

After putting together a structure of the film, I started writing the first draft of the script. It was very rough and took me a couple of days to get through but I did it! I then left it for a couple of days and re-read it. There were some elements I liked and some I didn't. I went back to my screen writing books and saw ways in which I could improve the script.

One piece of advice given in one of the books that I hadn't implemented so far was a board with all the scenes on. Using the beat sheet from Blake Snyder's book and from the short film book I have, instead of writing up scenes I put down the major plot points. I figured each plot point could come down to about a page each, leaving me with 15 plot points. This is how it looked on my bedroom wall:

each row represents an Act, with the middle 2 rows representing Act 2. It is read from left to right. This is what the cards looked like up close:

In this I've given: Location, brief description of what happens and what beat this represents in my film.

The +/- Is the emotional progression that goes on at this point. Blake Snyder points out that a film should be an emotional rollercoaster, so you need to make sure that your characters' emotions are constantly changing throughout.

> < This symbol represents conflict that happens in the scene or at this plot point. There has to be constant conflict of interests in the film between characters or things otherwise the audience will feel like nothing is really happening.

After my first draft, I put all these cards up and moved them around, took some cards away and wrote new ones. It was a good exercise as it allowed me to easily see the weakest and strongest points of the script and fix them to make them all of equal quality. After this I changed the script a lot, and while I still think it has a long way to go, I'm much happier with it now than I was.