I completed a polished draft of one screenplay and also rough drafts of two other screenplays but the last rough draft and my new script's rough draft have a lot of visuals, the last one has 70% visuals. the problem is the screenplay will run under 90 pages but when shot it'll run 120+ minutes. so how do I put it into market. BTW, dealing with visuals is a lot draining.
regards,
Ace.inc1
Well, I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "visuals" but I'm guessing that what you mean is that it's long on text and short on dialogue and that, as a result, it pages out short.
I must tell you. This is not a problem.
I have on occasion started with a long script and cut it down and ended up on the short side of a hundred pages. This is not a bad place to be. It is much, much worse to be on the the long side of a hundred and twenty pages, where I have, on occasion, also found myself (especially after executing producer's notes).
When a script comes up short (unless it's really short), the solution is very simple -- and I know some people may be shocked to hear this.
Just insert air.
Go through it and any block of text that's longer than around four or five lines -- break it up into separate paragraphs, each one of which is four lines or shorter.
You can have multiple paragaphs under a single slug line. It's allowed. And in many ways, it makes it more readable. It makes the script "scan" better. It doesn't look so dense.
So go through it, break up those big paragraphs. Chop 'em up. You would be amazed at how many pages you can add just by adding nothing at all. Emptiness. Blank lines. They can add up like nothing you ever saw.
If you can't add ten pages of nothing to your ninety pages -- you're just not trying hard enough.
I had a recent script that I wrote that came in, I think, around a hundred and ten pages, and a big note that my agent gave me was that scripts these days had to really have all the exposition cut down to the bone -- that's how "modern" scripts were selling. Just any kind of set up, any kind of character stuff -- cut it out, get right into the action. Cut everything down.
Then, once you sell it, they'll give you notes telling you to put it all back in -- then you can put it back in. But if it's there to start with, it'll bore them, and then they won't buy the script.
So I went through the script and I cut all that stuff out, with the result that the script was now down to something like 92 pages -- too short. So I didn't want to put more stuff in. The whole point was to cut it down. So I just went back and pumped it full of air -- and pumped it up to around 102 pages.
So the script was optioned and I then got a ton of notes which promptly blew the script up to well over 120 pages -- but I didn't have any problem, because the script was already so full of air, all I had to do was "suck some of the air" out of the script, by recondensing some of the paragraphs that I'd previously telescoped and it was a breeze to collapse the script back down to something like a 112 pages even with all that other material in it.
Which only really goes to show just how ridiculous that whole "minute a page" thing is, since the amount of actual stuff that you can put on a page is so flexible.
NMS
