Speaker A
If I put up an advert on Instagram, the hook is the first three seconds. You know when something grabs you. Well, you've got to do the same on the page with your first page and, in particular, that character intro.
Scriptfella critiques common screenwriting mistakes in page one title sequences, emphasizing strong hooks and visual storytelling.
Key Takeaways
- The first page must hook the reader/viewer immediately with conflict or intrigue.
- Avoid writing overly detailed production instructions in the screenplay.
- Use evocative language to create emotional resonance rather than just visual description.
- Specificity in story elements and character roles strengthens the narrative.
- Writing loglines for scenes helps assess their narrative impact and necessity.
Summary
- The video is a replay of a live class by Scriptfella focusing on screenwriting mistakes related to title sequences.
- The host critiques Amber's suspense thriller pilot, highlighting the importance of a strong hook in the first page.
- Emphasizes that the first page should grab attention like the first three seconds of an Instagram ad.
- Discusses the need for specificity and clarity in loglines and character introductions.
- Points out that overly detailed production-style descriptions can detract from the screenplay's readability.
- Recommends avoiding unnecessary details that do not serve the story or character development.
- Suggests using evocative names or descriptions (e.g., 'the shadow man') to create emotional impact.
- Encourages writing visually but in a way that respects the filmmaking process without micromanaging.
- Highlights the importance of conflict, shock, and character motivation in early scenes.
- Advises writers to write loglines for scenes to evaluate their effectiveness and narrative value.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
Welcome to the Script Fella Replay. This is a recording taken from a free live class that I give from time to time to my email subscribers. Let's get stuck in.
Speaker A
Amber, is Amber in the room?
Speaker A
Yep, right here. Hello, Amber. Wonderful to meet you.
Speaker A
Thank you for sending me 44. Let's have a look. This is a suspense thriller series. So, journalist Joe Coulter discovers a shadowy society of elite internal terrorists. To expose them, she infiltrates the enigmatic order, risking her safety, sanity, and soul. I love 44.
Speaker A
That's a nice thrillery title. You probably don't need to give us her name. A journalist. So, she discovers, discovers, you know, she could discover them. She could uncover them. And shadowy society, that's sort of, it's not bad. It's just we've heard it before.
Speaker A
A society of inter—what are internal terrorists from within their own country? He's a British journalist and we find out that there are people who are in the elite positions within different organizations that are terrorists.
Speaker A
Okay, so that is a big idea and I think it needs—you might need to have two sort of log lines in your TV show. So this is about a journalist who uncovers a society of terrorists and I don't know
Speaker A
what the line is, but it's, it's, you know, operating within Britain's elite institutions, intelligence services, and government. I don't know what the, what you know, where do they operate?
Speaker A
It was different things. It was the clergy, the Met, MI5, within the aristocracy, educational systems.
Speaker A
Okay. So that is awesome. So specificity here, I think Amber is a good, you know, there are terrorists inside the clergy.
Speaker A
Oh my goodness, that's a big, big idea. Let's get it on the page. Let's have a look at the first, the opening.
Speaker A
So this is our pilot. In a dim room, Alan Carlilele in shadow hovers over an elaborately carved desk.
Speaker A
An embossed green edge funeral card lies on the desk in front of him. Alan wears black gloves writing unseen on the card.
Speaker A
Pushes it into an envelope and seals it with green wax. NB. We never see Alan's face. Dissolve to POV of Alan as he strides the letter to a post box. NB. We never see Alan's face. Dissolve to post
Speaker A
box, postal van, sorting office continuous. From within the post box, the letter slips through the slot and tumbles onto the stack. A moment passes before the box opens and the basket is removed by a postman. We follow the
Speaker A
letter as it's slid into the postal van. The door closes, the van starts, and the letters jostle. A few moments later, the van stops, the door opens, and the basket moves into the sorting office.
Speaker A
The letter is dumped onto a counter. A postal worker's hand picks up the letter and places it into another basket.
Speaker A
Dissolve to a postal worker strolling towards the shard. The lift doors slide open and the postal worker saunters down the hall to the Bridge news office. They hand over a stack of letters from their postal bag, including the one with a
Speaker A
green seal. POV of the letter as the feminine hand of the receptionist places it into a letter tray on a desk. Joe Coulter, this is our character intro board, studies it for a moment, then wearily glances back at Michael Clifton,
Speaker A
38. It'll probably make my career. Nancy Pacer smirks, rolling her eyes. Head teacher in some junior college bonked a parent. Not just any parent. An MP backbench. Nancy sniggers. Michael stands and puts on his coat. You're jealous, right? But don't worry, I'll
Speaker A
remember you when I'm on air this afternoon. Thank you from the bottom of my shriveled little heart, Michael.
Speaker A
Nancy stifles a chuckle. Michael, annoyed, huffs out. Why does he try so hard? Fame, I guess. No, I mean, why does he try so hard to be an annoying git? Joe laughs and shrugs. She eyes the letter again while taking a sip of
Speaker A
coffee. It's addressed to the editor. Wanker. Taking up the letter, Joe taps on the door that reads Marcus Bridgely.
Speaker A
And then we meet Marcus M. Bridgely fervently typing to finish the notes next to him. So, what I like about this is that Amber is thinking cinematically.
Speaker A
This is very visual and I can see an enormous amount of time has gone in and effort to creating the visuals on the page.
Speaker A
And I think that this would probably work in the TV show. So if this is, if this is a production script, okay, so what happens on page one? It's the title sequences, right? Nobody's going to turn off in the first minute. But I don't
Speaker A
think it's optimized for the person who you need to influence to get your career up and going. Amber, and the reason is if I was to write, and this is always worth doing, write a log line for your first scene
Speaker A
and then look at it and see is there any conflict in it? Is there a shock in it? What does the character want? What's preventing them? And this feels very kind of title sequencey. I don't think it's worth expending a page when
Speaker A
basically if we were gonna create a log line for the sequence, it would be a guy signs a letter, it gets delivered to a newspaper. You know, that's a 60-minute pilot. That's one-sixtieth of your ammunition.
Speaker A
This is a very big part of the Script Fella program. How to write visually, but in a way that doesn't step on the toes of the people who are making the films. [clears throat] And I think that a lot of this reads like a production
Speaker A
script where you're giving us instructions on what you want in the final on the day. But I would argue that perhaps there's too much there. So let's just look at in a dim room. I don't know. I'm in a library, by the way. I
Speaker A
can't see a library from Carlile House Library. If we're in a library, you probably need to hit that location in the description. In a dim library, Alan Carlilele in shadow. So already we've got some friction here because the noun
Speaker A
Alan Carlilele is separated from the verb. And I know you're thinking cinematically, I want to have a shadow of a guy, but Alan Carlile noun hovers verb over an elaborately carved desk. An embossed green edge funeral card. So
Speaker A
it's embossed. It's green edge. Do we need to know it's green edge? Now, it may be very important for your TV show that these are important things. But at the moment, the fact that it's embossed and green edged, an embossed funeral
Speaker A
card lies on the desk. We don't need on the desk because he's there. He's in front of him here, lies in front of him probably. And then we know it's on the desk. He wears black gloves writing unseen. And this is taking me out of
Speaker A
your TV show. As is this. As is this. As is this. So, I'm not, I hope I'm not being mean here, Amber. I'm just going back to what, what's the organizing principle here to create an effortless read where the reader is suddenly just
Speaker A
in it. POV of Alan as he strides to a post box. What does that mean? POV.
Speaker A
Yeah. I didn't want the audience to see his face. So, that's it. You could see his hands or something, but you couldn't see. I never wanted them to know who he was. And 'cause he comes in.
Speaker A
Okay. Well, in which case I wouldn't call him Alan Carlilele because I'm seeing him when, you know, in a dim room a man in shadow hovers over a and you might call him the shadow man. The shadow man wears black gloves because if
Speaker A
you give him a name, the shadow man, it just gives us a feeling. It makes us feel something. You know, I always say that the word sentence comes from the Latin sentire, which means to feel. So our job is to write sentences that make the
Speaker A
reader feel something. And if you say the shadow man wears black gloves, that makes me feel something. Now you're writing postbox, postal van, sorting office continue. This is all instruction manual. And I would ask, is it important? Is it worth the budget of all
Speaker A
this time to basically describe what's going to happen in the title sequence? And I'd argue not. And when you say from in the post box, that's a clause opening. I don't know what I'm see.
Speaker A
The letter noun slips verb through the slot object tumbles onto the stack. That's interesting. Keep that sentence.
Speaker A
A moment passes. Do we need to time the TV show? And I talked about the as disease and um the until disease. And the other one is the before disease.
Speaker A
We're timing this happens before this happens. So I I just don't think the fact that the van starts and the letters jostle and a few moments later that's a clean image. Postal worker strolls towards the shard, the lift doors open.
Speaker A
Do we need to know this? This postal worker is not our main character and has more to do than our main character. And I'm [clears throat] going to come on to the intro at the moment. They hand over
Speaker A
the stack of letter just do we need all of this including the one the fact there's a stack and there's a postal bag it's just POV of the letter don't need this you know you'd probably need shadow guy writes this letter and then I'd
Speaker A
focus on this stamp embossed [clears throat] and if it's a super kind of cabal like secret society thing awesome and then just shadowman posts the letter postman rips it out and then we realize we're in the city So what
Speaker A
we've done is we've created a story by cutting out anything you know that's not particularly interesting. So I think it's uh it was Eisenstein and all those kind of guys in the 20s in Russia. It's called the Kulish effect and that's
Speaker A
where if you create a series of images and put them together in a certain order the reader will see something. So if you say shadowman post the letter and then the next shot suddenly we're in the city. We'll understand that all the bits
Speaker A
in between we know what's happened to the letter is what I'm saying. The most important bit is here. This is our television star and she doesn't have a description. She's not introduced at her most characterful. And in fact, and I I
Speaker A
do see this a lot. So I see a pattern here. A lot of people do it, Amber, where you introduce the main character in the same sentence, you introduce another one. So she looks at another character, but that means we split focus
Speaker A
and actually she's bored. Study it for a moment. You want to imagine that the actress gets to your script and says, "Right, this is me. What do I do? What's my opening introduction? I'm bored and I study it. Then I give it to Michael
Speaker A
Clifton." And then he says, "It'll probably make my career." And then already per the breakfast scene with all the kids. I'm on to Nancy Pacer and Joe has one word backbencher and then bottom of two she has a great
Speaker A
little line here. So, I would reconfigure the whole of this introduction that I think you've started because we want to see this letter arriving at the bridge news office, but try and create a stunning character intro for a movie star or or an actress,
Speaker A
a TV actress who wants to be this character. So, it's it's a question of what is the purpose of page one? Because as writers, we're thinking, right, what do I need to set up? Okay, how do we need to get the plot going? As opposed
Speaker A
to just suddenly take a step back and think, what would be an awesome way to open a Netflix TV show about this cabal?
Speaker A
And what would be an awesome description of this journalist? We've seen a lot of journalists. They're everywhere. There was one recently and it's not a very good character introduction to be honest. they're just sitting having an editorial. So, it's a high bar. You've
Speaker A
got to come up with something that's going to pattern disrupt the reader's day. You know, they're sitting there and just try and get into their head. This is reader psychology.
Speaker A
They've got your script because they like the log line and they think, well, I'll just open the first page and just make sure it's it's not something I should be across. So, you've got a pattern disrupt. It's like scroll
Speaker A
stopping. If I put up an advert on Instagram, the hook is the first three seconds. You know when something grabs you. Well, you've got to do the same on the page with your first page and in particular that character intro. But I
Speaker A
love the idea of terrorists inside the clergy and the government. I think that's awesome, Amber. So, uh, you're on track there, but have a think about the way you're using language and don't let go of your visual sense, the way that
Speaker A
you're writing. But do check out, I would suggest if you haven't watched my free master class. Somebody who has not come into my program sent me a message and he said, "I've been able to apply so many of the techniques in your free
Speaker A
class to my scripts. The results speak for themselves. From attaching major talent to optioning a script to one of Hollywood's top 10 highest grossing producers, the lessons you share have proven completely invaluable to my work.
Speaker A
But if you haven't seen the master class, um I think of everybody, all of you have probably signed up to it, but many of you will not have watched it because if you're like me, you'll say, "Right, I'll watch that later." And then
Speaker A
you go back to writing. So, here's my I'm going to exhort you to do something that's not going to cost you a penny, which is click on that link and rewatch the master class and then go and write
Speaker A
and then see if you can use some of the techniques from this class and that class [music] to write to a higher level like uh that guy did. I can't believe he got a movie star attached. Anyway, thank
Speaker A
you very much, Amber. Great work. Cheers.
Topics:screenwritingtitle sequencescript critiquescreenplay writing tipsvisual storytellingloglinecharacter introductionscreenplay formattingScriptfellaTV pilot
