Villaintine's Month: Miles Morales vs. Kingpin
This month we're looking at pairings of heroes and villains that have more chemistry than some romantic couples. What does it mean to be an archnemesis?
A blog about screenwriting and things that are useful for screenwriters.
Featured Friday
Weekend Read, our app for reading scripts on your phone, features a new curated collection of screenplays each week. This week, we travel through the fourth dimension with some of our favorite time travel stories. Our collection includes: * 11.22.63 - “The Rabbit Hole” by Bridget Carpenter * Avengers: Endgame
Featured Friday
Weekend Read, our app for reading scripts on your phone, features a new curated collection of screenplays each week. This week, we’re dropping you into the wilderness with some of our favorite survival thrillers. If you read Hatchet in middle school and thought, “I could do better than that
Resources
John tackles a difficult question for writers who wonder how long is too long to keep trying.
Featured Friday
Weekend Read, our app for reading scripts on your phone, features a new curated collection of screenplays each week. This week, we settle into January with some of our favorite dramas set during these long, cold winter months. Real talk, when I scheduled this I was hoping the Heated Rivalry
Resources
John surveyed current and former TV assistants to create a document that is both specific to the world of television and also can broadly apply as a template for how to be a better boss.
Featured Friday
This week, we celebrate the best part of awards season – the FYC screenplays released as part of Oscar campaigns!
Inneresting
John talks about knowing what medium would best suite the story you're trying to tell.
Resources
In screenplay scene headings, INT. and EXT. stand for interior and exterior, respectively. You use INT. when the scene takes place inside a location and EXT. when it occurs outside.
Inneresting
Thanks for joining us again for the start of another Inneresting year! Even though a new year is a somewhat arbitrary place to make a fresh start, it's a good time to take stock. What have you been doing? What are you doing? What do you want to
Useful Things for Writers
Weekend Read, our app for reading scripts on your phone, features a new curated collection of screenplays each week. This week, we're pulling from our proposed film studies syllabus to focus on larger than life storytelling. These stories ask big questions about what makes a hero, and peel
Colored pages are used in film and television to keep track of revisions to a script as it goes into production.
One easy way to show one character interrupting another is to use double-dashes or an ellipsis to indicate the first character’s dialogue is being interrupted.
V.O. (voice over) and O.S. (off-screen) are similar terms, but they have slightly different applications.
"I can't believe you haven't seen (x)!" In Scriptnotes episode 713, Danya Jimenez & Hannah McMechan talked briefly with John about how one element of film school is how it forces you to watch a lot of things you wouldn't necessarily seek
Weekend Read, our app for reading scripts on your phone, features a new curated collection of screenplays each week. This week, we remember Rob Reiner. Reiner brought the words of writers like Norah Ephron, William Goldman, Aaron Sorkin, and Stephen King to the screen, creating multiple modern day classics. Our
While it's a long way from large language models to generalized artificial intelligence in the real world, there are plenty of stories where artificially sentient beings question their humanity (and if they really need any). Frequently stories about artificial life, whether created by science or magic, focus on
Weekend Read, our app for reading scripts on your phone, features a new curated collection of screenplays each week. This week, we celebrate this year’s Golden Globe nominations with a look at the series nominated for Best Television Series, both Drama and Musical or Comedy. If any more scripts
Earlier this week we did a close reading of the sequence in Ted Lasso where Roy Kent quits his TV job and rushes back to Nelson Road to give coaching a chance. Let's pull back a little bit to talk about the overall impact of a climactic run
Weekend Read, our app for reading scripts on your phone, features a new curated collection of screenplays each week. This week, we look at movies that are deliberately set at Christmastime, but have nothing to do with the holiday itself. If you’ve ever wondered, “Wait, is that a Christmas
It’s easy to come up with quick setups for when a character needs to run away from something. All it takes is showing them in a place with someone or something they don’t want to be near. But what about when a character needs to run toward something
Sometimes the leftovers are the best part of the meal. Yes, on their own you can have yourself a microwaved portion of the same meal for several days, but because you can get creative. Just like how Monica Gellar invented the Moist Maker sandwich out of food from Thanksgiving dinner,