The best stories, short or long, are about the human heart.ģ.
Then let your story flow out of your character’s efforts to achieve this want. So give your main character a want or yearning for something that matters deeply to her or him. Writing compelling short screenplays requires what Thornton Wilder called “shortcuts to the imagination.” And knowing what your main character wants in your story is the most important shortcut to understanding and revealing who your main character is. Craft a complex character with a small, significant want When I read his rewrite, I was so moved I only wrote three words on the script-“Lovely and subtle.” As is his beautiful film.Ģ. A year later, Barry rewrote the script and “made it as simple as I was capable as a writer,” he told me.
At one point he tried to include a murder in the Laundromat, resulting in, yes, narrative cram. I saw them working the night shift at a twenty-four-hour Laundromat, young and intimate.” But even with this small, simple, significant image as a starting point for a short screenplay, Barry struggled to find a story he could tell well in six pages. So you need an idea that is small, specific, and significant to your main character.īarry Jenkins told me that the idea for My Josephine came from “an image in my head of two people’s feet dangling over a table. The result is what I call “narrative cram.” The story can’t breathe. They come in with big story ideas, often feature-length screenplay ideas, but quickly discover their idea won’t fit or work in the short form. This is always, always, the number one problem for my screenwriting students. Find a small, specific, significant idea you can tell well in a short script So here are six tips for crafting a short screenplay that connects, based on my long experience as a writer and as a screenwriting teacher at the FSU Film School and USC’s School of Cinematic Arts.ġ. It requires the craft and concentration of a medieval artist carving scenes in a walnut. A great short film can also open doors for you in the film industry, which Barry Jenkins discovered with his luminous short film script, My Josephine, written in my screenwriting class at Florida State University.īut writing a successful short screenplay isn’t easy. Interest in and access to creating and viewing short films and episodes of series has exploded worldwide, for both TV and the Web. There has never been a better time to learn the craft of writing short film scripts. 6 Tips for Writing Short Film Scripts That Connectīy Claudia Hunter Johnson, award-winning writer, screenwriter, documentary filmmaker and author of Crafting Short Screenplays That Connect 5e.
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