The Craft of the Screenplay

The screenplay is the foundation on which a film is built, a document that turns ideas into a plan others can film. Screenwriting has its own conventions, disciplines, and creative challenges, and understanding them helps both aspiring filmmakers and analysts appreciate how stories are prepared for the screen. A screenplay must do a great deal in a compact, visual, and readable form.

What a screenplay contains and how it looks

A screenplay describes what will be seen and heard, scene by scene, through action lines and dialogue. It uses a standard format with recognizable elements: scene headings that establish location and time, action or description written in the present tense, character names above their lines, and dialogue. This format exists so that a script communicates efficiently a