“What we can learn from…” type articles.
How to Nail Your Movie Theme: What is Your Screenplay Actually About? What is your screenplay about? What is your movie’s theme? These may seem like obvious questions. But …
Read moreHow to Definitively Nail Your Movie Theme – The ULTIMATE Guide
10 Fantastic Internal Conflict Examples Internal conflict is a powerful and absolutely essential tool used by writers and filmmakers in drama. These ten examples, as well as the internal conflict …
How to Write a Whodunnit A whodunnit is more a narrative structure, than a genre (although one could easily argue it’s a sub-genre). That’s why it can be presented …
Thriller vs Horror – What Are the Critical Differences? In terms of movie genres, Thriller and Horror are often mistakenly confused, or even lumped in together. The truth is, …
Read moreThriller vs Horror – Why The Subtle Differences Can Save Your Script
Generating Script Ideas – 5 Top Tips Whether you’re sitting down to write your first script or are an experienced writer writing your tenth screenplay – where you get your …
How to Write a Coming-Of-Age Movie As its name implies, a Coming-Of-Age movie focuses on the growth of the main character from youth to adulthood. In this context, it’s …
Crafting Ideas for Great Movie Titles: Your 5-Step Guide It is often argued that the first 5 pages of your script will make or break your chances in screenwriting …
Read moreCrafting Ideas for Great Movie Titles: Your 5-Step Guide
How to Write Outstanding TV & Movie Loglines: The ULTIMATE Guide There’s no doubt about it: A fundamental step in the initial stages of writing a screenplay is devising …
Read moreHow to Write Outstanding TV & Movie Loglines: The ULTIMATE Guide
Why Pro Film & TV Script Analysis is Critical to Writers There’s often an element of mystery or confusion surrounding script analysis services. Sitting at home, watching a bad film …
Read moreWhy Screenwriters Need Pro Script Analysis Now, More Than Ever
One of the world’s most popular screenwriting books, Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat has brought clarity and a sense of direction to thousands of screenwriters, many of whom were looking for the logical …
One of the world’s most popular screenwriting books , Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat has brought clarity and a sense of direction to thousands of screenwriters, who were looking for the logical extension of …
One of the world’s most popular screenwriting books , Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat has brought clarity and a sense of direction to thousands of screenwriters, who were looking for the logical extension of …
Read moreSave the Cat Analysis Series: DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUNDRELS
Period drama “Period drama” is a slippery term. Typically, it means a project set in a time period that’s older than recent memory. (While STRANGER THINGS is set in the period …
Reddit Screenwriting: A How-To… Reddit is an online community made up of smaller, individually themed communities, whether they’re centred around sharing simple images or jokes, posting personal anecdotes and …
15 Great Mike Judge Quotes After gaining a Physics degree from the University of California, Mike Judge put his science career on hold. The Ecuadorean-born American would go on to …
Read more15 Great Mike Judge Quotes for Writers & Filmmakers
On the Special Edition DVD/Blu-Ray for THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, Jodie Foster is interviewed as part of a retrospective. In the interview, Foster explains that a structurally insignificant scene …
Learning From the New Zealand All Blacks In the history of organised sports – globally – one team stands alone. The New Zealand All Blacks are the most successful sports …
Read moreWhat the Most Successful Sports Team Can Teach Screenwriters
In our Genius Character Reveals series we examine scenes and moments where a film or TV show reveals a tremendous amount of character information in a compressed amount of screen …
Why Screenwriting Etiquette is so important… As a new screenwriter, how does one conduct oneself in one of the most competitive industries in the world? It’s an important question, …
Read moreAn Ultimate Guide to Screenwriting Etiquette in Film & TV
DEAD MAN’S SHOES (2004) DEAD MAN’S SHOES follows Richard (Paddy Considine), a soldier who returns to his home town to get revenge on the men who abused his mentally-challenged brother …
Read more10 Screenwriting Lessons From DEAD MAN’S SHOES (2004)
31 Writing Lessons From Iconic Author Kurt Vonnegut With his deceptively simple prose style, novelist, playwright and essayist Kurt Vonnegut, jr. (1922 – 2007) bridged sci-fi and literary fiction. Novels like …
Read more31 Writing Lessons From Iconic Author Kurt Vonnegut
The ‘building-block’ nature of screenwriting is such that any screenwriter needs a selection box of varying skills. As you’d expect then, different screenwriters tend to find themselves drawn to, and …
Is the Subtle, Theme-rich Screenplay Dead? Theme-rich Screenplay Treated Unfairly? The plot-light, theme-rich screenplay is often – at the script development stage at least – unfairly maligned with the phrase …
It’s a cliché, but the entertainment industry is an industry. Show business is a business. It behoves screenwriters to remember this and to consider why write films in the first place. What …
Read moreOPINION: Screenwriters Should Consider the Cinema Experience
To write omnisciently as a screenwriter often entails, for better or worse, including elements that may never show up onscreen: jokes in descriptions or insights into characters’ thoughts and histories …
ANGEL HEART Alan Parker’s ANGEL HEART is an odd blend of genres, taking noir, psychological thriller and horror to a three-way shotgun wedding. The screenwriting lessons it can teach us …
Thriller Screenplay Power As a genre, ‘thriller’ tends to gently caress several others, namely horror, sci-fi, and drama. As such, thriller screenplays provide a goldmine of various narrative and structural …
Whilst advocating the deflection of script notes may be a strange thing for a dedicated script consultancy to do, the truth is that there is a great deal of bad …
One facet of screenwriting which causes writers enormous headaches is conveying a lot with a little. Studying great minor characters is one way of learning this kind of efficiency. Minor Characters To …
Endings are crucial. The feeling an ending gives an audience is the feeling they leave the cinema with. It’s the feeling that will colour their perception of their whole experience …
There are two kinds of rugby player”, the legendary Scottish coach Jim Telfer told his players, “there are the honest ones, and there’s the rest. The honest player gets up in …
Read more10 Commandments of the Accountable Screenwriter (Download)
Writing mythically with cliché is relatively easy: watch a couple of films, read a couple of books then regurgitate the obvious stuff: quasi-religious story world, the quest, the mentor, initiation, …
Read moreHow to Write “Mythically” but Avoid Cliche – PDF Guide
An almost-great screenplay can be more frustrating than a really bad one. The potential is strong and the execution is almost there, but something went wrong at the final hurdle. …
15 Genius Inciting Incidents by Screenwriters You’ve created a fully developed character or series of characters and are now pondering their motivation through the narrative you’ve started to develop. Inciting …
10 Great Mid-Film Plot Twists by Screenwriters Too often when watching a film, especially for those of us who have seen many of them, you can read where the story …
Conflict is essential in every great story. The amount and complexity of the situation can obviously vary greatly depending on the scope, settings and characters involved. In some cases, loading …
Read more10 Moments Where Problem Upon Problem Hits the Protagonist
Writing Science Fiction Screenplays Sci-Fi is one of those odd genres – like the Western – that among script theorists often stimulates more argument about ‘defining your terms’ than it …
Writing Horror Screenplays: How to Write Teen Horror From 1974’s BLACK CHRISTMAS – rightly credited with being the god-monster of the modern mainstream genre – through to every postmodern twist …
Read moreWriting Horror Screenplays: How to Write Teen Horror
Writing Horror Screenplays: How to Write Occult Horror Occult literally means ‘hidden’ so all Horror could be described as occult in the sense that all Horror deals with things that …
Read moreWriting Horror Screenplays: How to Write Occult Horror
Writing Horror Screenplays: How to Write Supernatural Horror Supernatural Horror is perhaps the most writer-friendly of all Horror sub-genres because its effectiveness really does live on the page, rather than being hostage to practical …
Read moreWriting Horror Screenplays: How to Write Supernatural Horror
In a giant sea of screenwriting tips and advice, where does one begin? It’s almost as bad as dieting these days. Cranberries are bad for you. No, scrap that, we’ve …
Read moreThese are the Only Screenwriting Tips Worth Keeping
You’ve rewritten, redrafted, typed ‘Fade Out’ more times than you can count. You’re finally satisfied that your script, the one you’ve poured months maybe even years into writing, is finished. …
Read more10 Fee-Charging Screenwriting Contests, their Likely Profits and Prestige
What hasn’t been written about Hitchcock already? From Francois Truffaut and Raymond Durgnat, to every casual message board user on IMDb, great swathes of humankind have discussed at length the …
Way back when… For much of the 80’s and into the 90’s, “Schwarzenegger” was a byword for a movie with a high body count. The box office was peppered with …
You’re no stranger to getting advice if you’re a writer. Thousands of books, hundreds of films, and even entire college majors have been dedicated to the art of honing the …
Let’s be blunt about it: the financial outlook isn’t great for Film Producers at the moment. A Film Producer Salary is firmly not what it once was… I remember the …
Read moreThe Film Producer Salary & A Pocket Full of Dollars
The Berlin International Film Festival was distinctly different this year. Sure, there was the typical melee of execs taking pictures around remnants of the Berlin Wall. And yes, as per …
Welcome and hello to the thousands of you who visit the IS website every week. By way of an introduction, I’m Miranda Fleming, and I’m thrilled to be starting this …
Read moreSwerving Development Hell in the New Dawn of Crowdfunding
Like it or lump it, the role of the industry script reader is becoming increasingly important in film and TV. With the volume of scripts increasing year-on-year, the challenge for …
How to Write a Screenplay: Your 30-Step Guide. So – you want to learn how to write a screenplay. You think about it constantly. Whenever you watch a movie you …
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