Master Screenwriting with Write a Duet: Quick Formatting Tips (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Okay, I'm going to show you how to use a program called Write a Duet, and it is a screenwriting program that will format your script very quickly for you. In another video I'll show you how you can just very quickly do it in Word, but there are some things that you need to do in order to make it look like a script. Now, Write a Duet is a free program that you can use online. What we're going to do here is I'm just going to quickly show you some of the elements that you need to have in your script. Now, the first thing that you need to do is here in the line here, type in a slug line. Now, a slug line tells you whether you're in an interior or an exterior, meaning, in other words, are we going to be inside or outside? So in this case, I'm going to say that we're inside and we're in a classroom. Now, we also put what time of day it is, so you notice there that when I went space hyphen space, it gives me my options here, so I'm going to go with day, and then I'm going to hit enter, and then it's ready for me to start writing my action. So by action, it just means what's simply happening on the screen. So in the classroom, all the students stare. Whenever something new happens, it's best to take a new line. You don't want to have chunks of paragraph. It's not like a novel. It's meant to be read very quickly and have lots of white space, so people can get through it very quickly and know what they need to do. So if we want to have some dialogue, I'm going to hit the tab button, the tab button brings it in there like that, and let's just say the teacher is going to speak, so I put teacher. It gets it ready in the center there for you to put your dialogue. So he's not very happy that Jimmy is late again, and he's going to reply, so I hit tab, put in Jimmy's name, hit enter. If we're going to go to a new scene, let's say something's going to happen outside now, then we create a new slug line. So over here, I can hit scene, and it gets ready for a new slug line. This time, let's go outside, so I'm going to put ext for exterior. Let's say now we're out in the playground, and again, day, we're ready to go. All right, that's just a very quick and easy way to write your script. As you can see here, WriterDuet does it all for you. All you really need to know is the tab button and the enter button, but the other things you need to know is that every scene starts with what we call a slug line that tells us whether we're inside or outside, where we are, and what time of day we are. There's a little bit more to it than that, but for the purposes of what you are doing, largely, dialogue is centered, and the font is always in Courier to give it that old typewriter look. Okay, my next video will be to show you how to quickly write up a script just using Word, so see you then.