Story-Telling: Screenwriting using Final Draft

In the industry professional screenwriters use a piece of software called Final Draft to write their scripts. As part of our course we spent some time learning how to use this software. We first spent some time with Simon who showed us how to format certain aspects (of which Final Draft does a lot of for you) of the script. Next we were given a task:

• Write a 3 page script about a journey using our ride to Uni each morning as inspiration.

For this task with worked in pairs and I partnered with Ida. We first spent some time thinking of an idea and mind mapping some possible "moments". After writing a few things down we came up with what we thought was a good idea:

• The Wonderful, Incredible, Amazing, Spectacular, Supernatural, Awesome Journey To Uni: Josh and Ida are running late on the train and as a result of this they miss their bus. Luckily the Gummy Bear Pilot and his Candy Helicopter come to the rescue. However, the pilot turns out to be a ghost and the helicopter begins to plummet. There is only one marshmallow parachute left, who will survive?...

The idea was very odd but creative and the dialogue was a mix of awful jokes and silly humour. It was very fun to write and I had a great time working with Ida. We worked very well together and our good senses of humour helped us keep it entertaining. We spent most of the time laughing at how bad our jokes were!

I found Final Draft really easy to use and I think it's a brilliant piece of software, I can see why all screenwriters use it. I think our final script was really good and I loved the dialogue we came up with. At first I really didn't think we could fill 3 pages but in the end I think we could have written even more.

Once we finished the script we handed it to Simon who read it and then wrote some feedback on it. He said he liked the dialogue but thought that we needed to write more about what the audience sees and more about the characters themselves. Looking back on it now I have to say I agree, our script did need some more descriptions of locations and how certain objects, like the Candy Helicopter, appeared on screen. I think we focused on the dialogue so much that we forgot about expanding on the actions.

Overall it was a great task and I enjoyed working with Ida. I look forward to writing my full 10 page script.

Here are the final marked pages of our script:

TITLE PAGE

PAGE 1

PAGE 2

PAGE 3