I was hired by two producers to break down a book to then be pitched to Richard Donner as a feature. Let’s first discuss pitching, a most horrible exercise guaranteed to make you insane. There are also templates in Final Draft that can help (we’ll get into those in subsequent articles). Click here to learn about some of these tools. These are marketing concepts, and every writer and writing student should understand them.įinal Draft 12 has many tools geared to help with these processes, which can make writing life so much easier for both you and your students. They’re a little like Russian nesting dolls each fits into the other. Outlining, be it mind maps, index carding, or just a standard, level-based structure (1, 1a, 1b, etc.) has a place here tangential to the creation of the others. Getting them right is as much an art form as it is a pure writing exercise. Each serves a purpose and each is unique. Loglines, synopses, treatments, beat sheets, and pitch decks - all of these are marketing tools. To that end, let’s begin a discussion about some of the tools a writer should have - and can easily learn in a classroom environment - to help our charges to succeed as scriptwriters. I made it through to start a great career, but I truly wish someone had introduced me to concepts that would have helped me stumble less at that time. Honestly though, I was lost during most of that early experience because I had never done anything like that before. I was overjoyed to be hired to write the script. I then had to craft a story treatment to be approved. I was hired to write a script based on a concept that I delivered to a film company looking for sequel ideas to one of their films. It doesn’t happen often for those without a track record, but it can happen. But film is somewhat unique in that during certain periods of any selling cycle, a pitch, written or verbal, can sometimes be enough to get a sale (or at least interest). Nothing can be critiqued, edited, promoted, or sold until it’s real. Every scriptwriter’s first job is to finish their script.
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