Only My Scriptwriting

Thirty-Nine Plus

Thirty-Nine Plus

What I needed to finish writing my single paragraph Scene Outlines was thirty-nine for Episode Four, Probable Death, for my Water Wars scriptwriting project. That’s what I got. I figured that I would get it done earlier today at work. Just didn’t know how long it would take to do it.

I kind of hit it right on the nose. Thought it would take me about eight hours of writing time to finish this last scene outline, and it did. Wasn’t sure I was going to be able to do that several times, but luckily those times didn’t slow me down too much. I still got my thirty-nine written.

The first ten I got within the first two hours that I was there. That’s five per hour. I was hoping the rest of the shift went the same way. If it had, I would have gotten these thirty-nine done in about eight hours. Unfortunately, five per hour didn’t last very long. I was lucky if I got four, sometimes five.

I also had some trouble with these single paragraphs too. Knew what I wanted to write, but I didn’t know how to write them. Had a lot of re-writes. Luckily, they were too bad. Only a word or two needed to be change. That took some time to do, but it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.

Also had a lot of editing to be done with my paragraphs. I have a set amount of lines for my Outlines. Depending on if it’s a character, a numeric scene number, or an Establishing Shot, the number of lines are between three and six. With the fours and fives taking up most of the paragraphs.

The Teaser Acts and the Tag Acts for my Story Outlines, and the Establishing Shots for my Scene Outlines are three lines long. My four- and five-line paragraphs are for both types of Outlines. In my Story Outlines it depends on the character name aka Chaad, Suuri, and Hoolle. They are five lines each.

My secondary characters are Reen, Voonc, and Kiirra. They are four lines each for my Story Outlines. The Scene Outlines are a little bit different, but they are also the same too. They are based on which scene line number it is. Except for the Establishing Shots. They’re always three lines long.

Scene line numbers ones, threes, sixes, and eights are five lines each. Two, four, seven, and nines are four lines per scene line number, and the fives and tens are six lines each. I have based the number of lines per scene depending on how strong that scene is. That’s why the sixes are more important.

The fives and tens are more action-oriented. So, they are six lines each. My more serious scenes are the five lines per scene number. Last but not less are my four lines scene numbers. They are usually the fillers for whatever the storyline is for these characters, and they aren’t as important as the other ones.

My scripts aren’t as planned out as my Outlines are. They are the traditional formatting for a script. The only thing that makes them like my Outlines is that each scene number has a specific number of lines for that scene. What does that mean? It means that in a way my scripts are planned too.

All combined the scenes for my scripts are fifteen seconds each aka fifteen lines per scene. The ones, threes, sixes, and eights are still fifteen seconds, but the twos, fours, sevens, and nines are thirteen seconds long, and my fives and tens are nineteen lines long for a total of fifteen seconds/lines each.