Searching for a relationship between length and runtime It’s also worth noting that film scripts are formatted differently to TV, radio and theatre plays.
There are plenty of guides online on how to format a screenplay. There are other elements and formatting rules but I’m focusing on the ones which affect our investigation of the one-minute-per-page rule. Writers are normally advised to keep these to a minimum and only to use them when vital to understanding, such as “(sarcastically)” or “(to the dog)”. Parentheticals – A few words in brackets between the Character and Dialogue, giving guidance on how the line is to be spoken.Dialogue – The words the character is speaking.Character – The name of the character who is about to speak.Action – Descriptions of what is happening in the scene, how the characters are moving and anything else the reader/viewer needs to know which is not contained in the dialogue.INT is used for interior scenes and EXT for exterior scenes. Scene heading – Setting out where the upcoming scene takes place and sometimes a time of day/night.The formatting on a modern film script is extremely exacting, including pre-defined margins, layout, headings, capitalisation and font (12 point, 10 pitch Courier Typeface). Let’s see what the data reveals… A quick primer on film screenplay formatting This isn’t a comprehensive list but already you can see that many different types of industry people rely on the rule being at least broadly correct. Post-production staff who can estimate how much work they may have to do on the final edit.Actors who can get a sense of their character’s screen time,.Producers and Studios who can check if the film is within the boundaries of commercial exploitation,.
The rule John is referring to is that a film based on a (properly formatted) 90-page screenplay will be roughly 90 minutes long. A few weeks ago, John August dropped me an email which included a simple question: “How accurate is the page-per-minute rule of thumb?”