Anyone with advice or experience writing action scenes in a spec script? I've read several dozen shooting script with detailed action scenes but never a spec script, and the audience is obviously quite different. My "action" involves small submarines and robotic vehicles and torpedoes in a confined...
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Me still making word trains. Me make big trains, now. Sometimes word trains die but that's how it goes sometimes. LOL
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Be direct and clear. Don't overdo it with the details. Make it really entertaining. And make sure you cut the action with dialogue. Even a short "All clear!" or "It's on!" can help buoy the flow so you don't get bogged down in action lines.
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Bit late to the party but writing action is something I'm confident enough to say I'm strong in.
The best tip I can give is listen to music while you picture your action scenes, then translate those ti...
Expand commentBit late to the party but writing action is something I'm confident enough to say I'm strong in.
The best tip I can give is listen to music while you picture your action scenes, then translate those timings into the page count. It's really easy to go overboard with action and have two minutes of screentime represented by ten pages of words. Get the timings right and everything will flow in place after.
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Aided by everyone's feedback (thank you all!) I am pretty happy with my three main action scenes, especially the climactic one. I will need some unbiased feedback but the final one makes makes my hold my breath while reading it, even though I wrote it.
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Dan, as I read that page of Lucas' script, I see a lot of structural similarities to my action scenes, and now think maybe I leaned more towards a "shooting" script vibe than a spec script. No one who has read it has complained yet, so maybe I'll leave it as is.