![]() ![]() Can you tell your story in 3 days (6 hours) or will you need a week (10 hours)? Regardless of how many days it is, you will need to divide each two-hour episode into 7 acts. The average mini series runs for two hours a night over several days. With the basic building blocks of your story in hand, determine how many hours you think you will need to tell the story. The rest of the time is given to commercials. In an average "hour" of commercial television, only about 44 minutes are dedicated to the story you are watching. This also decreases the amount of actual storytelling time you have. Unless your series is definitely running on a network like HBO or Showtime, your story will be interrupted by commercial breaks. When writing for television, you must take commercial breaks into account. Even if there is a character with only a few lines of dialogue, if you have done this kind of work, that character will stand out as well and serve as more than an expositional device.ĭetermine Length and Structure. These extra types of questions may not give you information that will be literally written on the pages of your story, but will give you a wealth of information from which to create a whole, layered character.ĭo the same exercises for every other character in your script. Where would this person like to go on vacation? What kinds of things do they do for fun? What were their grandparents like? But you may also want to include information that may not be directly reflected in your script. You want to make sure to include the basic information-who they are, what kind of person they are, what they want, what they fear, etc. List as much information as you can think of. While you may have lots of characters in your story, you will likely have one major protagonist (or hero, the person the audience wants to succeed) and one major antagonist (or villain, the person who is or creates the main obstacles to your protagonist's success.)Įxplain these characters in the most detail. From the information you have so far, determine who your major and minor characters are. What makes them interesting? What makes them important? What makes them compelling? You will need all this information as you move forward to tell a story that is complete and satisfying for your audience.ĭescribe Your Characters. List all the major and minor plot points and do some writing about them. Try another free writing exercise where you explain in detail the facts of the story. List all of the pieces of the story you want to tell. In this first step, get all of the information you can before you start whittling the fat away. You won't use every fact that you find, but you will need to have all of the information you can so that the story is complete and makes sense when you are done writing. If your story is based on true events or true people, you will need to dedicate some time to researching the facts of the story. You will need to know exactly what drew you to the story so that you can draw other people to the same ideas. Ask yourself why you want to tell this story and write out your answer. Determine what story it is you want to tell and do a free writing exercise to help develop the story. In order to write any script effectively, you must know your story in and out before you begin writing anything in a script form. How to Write a Screenplay Script for a Television Mini Seriesĭevelop and/or research your story. Read on to learn about how to write effectively for this genre. The stories must be large enough to justify several hours of story time, tight enough that they can be told over commercial breaks, and compelling enough that viewers will tune in day after day to get the whole story. Kat lives in Los Angeles with her three rescue dogs.Writing in this genre is a challenge. Kat Corbett’s voiceover work includes clients such as Mercedes Benz, and in 2017 & 2018 Kat was the Fox Sports promo voice for the FIFA World Cup. In addition, Kat’s screenplay and a TV pilot both scored Second Rounder status from the Austin Film Festival, she was a top 10 ATX Pitch Fest finalist, a 3rd Quarter finalist for Shore Scripts, and a Screencraft Short Story semifinalist. Not wanting to be pigeonholed as a music person, Kat wrote a dramatic Gulf War script Freedom 90, which garnered a Top 3 Finalist spot in the 2018 Final Draft competition. While in radio, she honed her craft writing comedy bits for air and copywriting for a vast array of clients. ![]() Kat Corbett is a radio DJ veteran with thousands of broadcast hours under her belt from KROQ in Los Angeles and SiriusXM. ![]() Meet Kat Corbett, Top 3 in 2018 with Freedom 90 in the period/historical/war feature category. Final Draft Big Break is celebrating its 20th anniversary! We wanted to share some of the success stories. ![]()
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