5 Basic Steps in Screenplay Writing | Film Production

1. CREATE A LOGLINE & DEVELOP YOUR CHARACTERS • 
2. A great way to start the process is by coming up with a logline: one or two sentences that will encapsulate your story in an intriguing manner. • Now, develop your characters. Write their backstories. Refine their personalities. Think about what makes them tick. • Always make sure that your characters have goals that they need to achieve. The point is that characters having purpose is what makes them interesting. Flat characters destroy scripts. No matter how great your action sequences are or how original your concept is, one dimensional and uninteresting characters will ruin your story.
3. WRITE AN OUTLINE • 
4. An outline (sometimes called a Beat Sheet) is a brief synopsis of your entire story. Try to fit it on one to two pages, and be concise. • Think of the outline as the ‘definition’ of your script. • This is where you should begin to think about structure. • An average screenplay will be about ninety to one hundred pages. • Divide those pages by three. There’s your acts: the first one should introduce your characters and setting and feature an inciting incident that gets the story underway. • The second act is where your characters encounter obstacles as the story escalates into a crisis. The third act is where the crisis becomes climax (think victory or defeat), after which the story slows down and resolves itself.
5. WRITE A TREATMENT • 
6. Treatments are effectively a more in-depth version of your outline. Expound upon it and write your whole story scene by scene in a conventional manuscript style. • Experiment with dialog, or at least make note of what you want your characters to say. • The treatment is where you really start building the world that your story takes place in. • A typical feature treatment will clock in at around thirty pages.
7. WRITE YOUR SCRIPT • 
8. You’ve developed your characters, structured your plot, and have an inspired treatment. • Understand the formatting. Write in the present tense. • Remember to show, not tell: you’re writing for the eyes and the ears. • It’s always a good idea to write in a script editor to help streamline the process, and Celtx Studio features one that is tried, true, and hugely popular (and it’s free).
9. WRITE YOUR SCRIPT AGAIN and again and again • 
10. If you think your first draft is perfect, it’s not (sorry). Go back, read it through, take stuff out, and add stuff in. • Get other people to read it and commit yourself to being open to constructive criticism. Don’t just look for feedback from professionals and editors – lovers of fiction or plain old movie fans can offer advice just as sound as any seasoned screenwriter. • Throw your script out there and surround yourself with the ideas that come back. Always be refining and revising, and just when you think you can’t possibly revise any further, do it again. • It all comes down to practice. Most professional screenwriters complete multiple features before they write a script that sells. A select few hit it out of the park on the first try. All will agree that you need to be dedicated.
11. Presentation slides (ppt
12. Video lecture