Theme is the most important element of any screenplay. It aligns and focuses the plot, subplots, characters and dialogue. It is the Rosetta stone which allows you to translate that great concept you have into a great screenplay. But that’s not all it does...
I recently went to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and looked at dozens of pencil drawings by Gustav Klimt. Surprisingly, I made an interesting mental connection with screenplay outlines: A pencil drawing visualizing what is going to be painted is to an oil what a screenplay is to a film.
DRAGON AGE: DAWN OF THE SEEKER, with a screenplay by award-winner, Jeffrey Scott, is now available on Blu-Ray-DVD combo. Read the review.
Last month I asked my readers what their favorite animated series of the last 50 years were. Now the votes are in...
My book, How To Write For Animation, has just been released for the Kindle and other eBook formats. Read what Jeffrey Katzenberg, Stan Lee and others have to say about it.
You sat before the TV watching them when you were a kid. Now dig up those warm memories and let's find out the favorite cartoons of the past 50 years!
CharactersEngage.com Interviews Jeffrey Scott: Can Characters Have Universal Appeal?
Congratulations to all my friends at Reliance Animation for winning the 2012 FICCI BAF Award for "Best Animated TV Episode"!
Every screenwriter is born with an amazing writing tool. It’s called the human mind. But if you don’t know how to use it effectively you could be wasting a lot of creative potential. I’ve found a very special way to resolve creative story problems that I think you’ll find very useful...
Wish it wasn’t so damned hard to write a great screenplay? Wish no more! Emmy-winning writer Jeffrey Scott reviews THE CORE ELEMENTS screenplay writing method.
The secret to great screenplay writing is keeping it simple and visual. Words can be your friends as well as your deadliest enemy. Here’s a short tip that will improve your writing with every word you don’t write.
When I’m not writing important blog posts I’m writing frivolous stuff like feature films. Earlier this year I had the pleasure of working with Chris Moujaes, the Director of Original Entertainment at FUNimation Entertainment, and producer April Bennett on Electronic Arts/Bioware’s animated feature film, Dragon Age: Dawn of the Seeker...
As you graduate today, and face an uncertain jobs market, many of you are asking yourselves 'What does the future of animation hold for me?' To see what lies ahead, one only need look to the past...
There is no precise definition of what writer’s block is. Most likely, it’s just the terror of staring at a blank page or screen and thinking that the next words that come out of your cranial matter have got to be Oscar quality. Whatever it is, it’s really not that hard to handle. Over the years I have found three effective ways to get past whatever is blocking my creativity...
I’m going to use this post to vent a little—but also to make a point specifically for the benefit of all the producers around the world who want to make animated features.
Ever get a big fish on the line only to have it get away before you could pull it into the boat? You probably didn’t set the hook. Rule #1 in fishing: set the hook. The same is true in screenwriting, only you’re not trying to hook a fish, you’re trying to hook the audience. You don’t need a fishing rod, you need ten great pages.
Self promotion turned out to be the hottest topic yet on my blog. My three posts on the subject are approaching 6,000 reads! I have received dozens of comments, both on the blog and at LinkedIn, over 95% of which were in agreement that self-promotion is vitally important. You get it! That's good! Here's what I got...
Does self-promotion really work? What happens when you promote your writing via blog, Facebook and LinkedIn? Over the past several weeks I’ve done just that. The results are in. Check out this post and find out exactly what happened with my experiment in self-promotion...
I got a huge response to my last post, Why Do Many Artists & Writers Hate Self-Promotion?, including several active discussions on various LinkedIn groups. Self-promotion is a very hot topic! Many of the people who commented on the post talked about their shyness, self-doubts, the unworthiness of their creativity, and other barriers to promoting themselves and their work. One of the biggest concerns was whether or not self-promotion was really effective. Well, let's find out...
A funny thing happened on the way to my Facebook page. A handful of professional contacts refused to be my friend, not because they didn’t like me, but because they weren’t on Facebook. The interesting thing was that they seemed to take pride in not being on Facebook. This reminded me of something I’ve noticed over my career, an odd anomaly about many writers and artists: They don’t like to promote themselves. Not a good idea!
Do you write part time? Do you write for just a few hours a day? Are you writing a spec screenplay a few days a week or month? If you answered any of these questions in the affirmative you may be losing more time (and creativity) than you think. Let me give you a few suggestions that will help you get a lot more writing done...
What is the #1 most important ingredient of every great screenplay?
Is it great characters?
Great plot?
High Concept?
It’s none of these. The #1 most important ingredient of every great screenplay is...
In my previous post, How to Turn Microsoft Word into a Terrific Screenwriting Program, I explained how to use Word’s “styles” to automatically create script formatting. I received a blog comment from Ben Cahan, the creator and co-founder of Final Draft, who pointed out that a true screenwriting program was more than just “margins and capitalized slug lines and character names”. Ben makes a good point. Whereas Word allows you to easily and automatically format basic script elements such as slug line, action, character name, parenthetical, dialog and transitions, that’s about all it can do. Final Draft, in contrast, does those things and much more.
The book publishing industry, like the newspaper biz, is on a glide path to oblivion. It's just too easy and cheap to download a book to your computer, iPad, Kindle or smartphone.
And that was last year!
Now it takes less time to publish your own book than it does to write a publisher query letter, let alone send it out and wait for the rejection letters.
Before you run off half-cocked with that shiny new animated six-shooter of yours, here are a few pieces of advice that will help you live long and prosper in this business. It would be foolish to think you could become a good animation writer without first understanding a little bit about creativity, especially considering cartoon writing is one of the most creative forms of writing there is. Fortunately, creativity is not as ethereal as some might lead you to believe.
