FORMATTING TIP: Accent, dialect and foreign language in dialogue

foreign language in dialogue - a tower of babel?

A powerful tool in creating distinctive characters is their language, using accent, dialogue and even foreign language. In the real world, everyone speaks in a way that is slightly different from everyone else. In sociolinguistics, this is called an idiolect. (from Greek idiōma ‘private property, peculiar phraseology’, and idios ‘own, private’) A few years ago I … Read more

FORMATTING TIP: Superimposed Text + Over Black

So we’ve started a YouTube channel! Steven Miao created the opening video sting and Mukul Kandara helped with setting it all up. Thanks, guys! The channel had been in the making for a long time, but I just have been too busy with clients, teaching and workshopping awesome projects. What I was planning on doing … Read more

Final Draft 10 Reviewed

How do you go about writing a screenplay? There are a few of us who sit down at the computer, like some modern day Dalton Trumbo at his trusty Remington, type FADE IN: and keep going until the cigarette packet is empty. If you are one of this talented few, script formatting applications like Celtx, … Read more

Learn Screenwriting By Doing It – Online And In Your Own Time

free screenwriting course

The below is a report of an experiment: the trial run of the legendary Immersion Screenwriting course. The beta version was a little rough and dirty – but free, and effective! A free screenwriting course? Too good to be true. Of course it is. But hear me out. As my boss in London told me, you … Read more

What You Can Learn From The Avatar Screenplay

In the Avatar screenplay, like in every screenplay, a moment occurs when the main character moves from Act One into Act Two. ‘Moves’, because in successful films, this is the point where we travel from A to B. In screenwriting jargon, we call this the First Threshold. Sometimes, it happens in the blink of an eye, … Read more