Screenplay


The opening
Whatever length of film you intend to make, you need a dramatic opening. This is part of the first act – the beginning. If you do not hook your audience in the first few minutes, you will find it much harder to keep them glued to the screen throughout. I find it best to write the opening last. You might have a good idea for the opening, but get your story worked out first, and then create an impressive opening scene.

Pace
You will want to vary the pace of the action. Think of it as a range of mountains with just one or two very high peaks, some troughs and several smaller peaks. For an action film the protagonist will need to be thwarted a few times as well as revealing exceptional powers of recovery, and the ability to escape from the most impossible situations. In the best scripts the highest peak, or climax, grows organically out of the elements of the story.
Periods of action can alternate with moments of reflection or character building dialogue. These are often called beats. A good film needs a beat –something new happening is another way of putting it - every minute or so in a short film.

Structure
The overall shape or structure to the story is important and should have a pleasing symmetry. The opening should complement the ending, or mirror it.
Slumdog Millionaire opens with an enigma which is resolved in two ways at the end. We guess from the title that the protagonist Jamal will be financially successful, but we don’t know how he will achieve it, or what the other element is.

Foreshadowing
Foreshadowing gives the audience subtle clues as to what might happen later, or how a character might develop. It sets up possibilities that can be developed later. A cleverly developed scene can plant an unconscious awareness in the viewer of what might happen. You don’t want to be too obvious and give too many hints and clues, but foreshadowing can lead to a more complete ‘closure’.
Foreshadowing can include special skills that the protagonist has acquired previously, for example a character might have great skill at cards, or be a very quick thinker or be a good shot with hand guns as the protagonist of a Western always is. It might include close-ups of objects, or hints of trouble at certain locations. For films involved with the supernatural, there is often a place or site that has attracted supernatural forces in the past. A most unlikely character may supply this information.

Treatment of time
The great thing about writing a film or TV drama is that you can do anything you like with time. You can make everything happen within a 24-hour timespan, or you can extend it over 50 years like Citizen Kane? You just need to remember that everything the viewer sees apparently happens in present time. You can create a specific time such as Christmas, with the simple device of a few decorations and a fancy dress party.
Early cinema directors exploited time with great effect. Events appear to happen ‘before your very eyes’. In fact, you can create any time period you wish – past, present or future – but it all will appear to be happening now.
You decide on what time span works best for your film.
To create a claustrophobic, intense atmosphere where the characters are under pressure, set your film in a tight time span, say one day.
Gothic horror in the Dracula mode is often set over a contained time span such as a weekend or one day.
Think carefully about the time span you want to put your characters in. It can make a big difference to the pace and feel of your drama.


Backstory
Backstory is Hollywoodese for a character’s past life. The difficulty for anyone starting from scratch is that you may know a lot about your main character, but the viewer knows nothing except what he or she looks like in Scene 1. So you have somehow to create a backstory for your characters, and certainly for your protagonist.. The backstory will show your character’s internal desire and illuminate the reasons for wanting his or her goal, whether it is for ultimate power or love or that old war-horse money. Backstory may mean dropping into the script factual details about the past, such as where a character was born and grew up, as in Forest Gump. It often works better if you can suggest a more psychological backstory, such as an inability to relate to the opposite sex owing to some trauma in childhood.
Incorporating backstory into the action
The problem remains as to how you incorporate details and psychological traits into your script, so that they become part of the action. Even more important is how you realize them visually.

Scriptwriter’s Storyboard
A scriptwriter’s storyboard is a good way to see whether your story is working visually. You do not have to be good at drawing to make a useful storyboard. You are just testing to see if your story works in a visual way. The important word is story not board.
A storyboard at the early stage of script writing is a tool to help you see if your story hangs together. All you need to do is put in the action with a variety of different shot sizes.
Once you have got your ideas into storyboard form, you need to make sure everything will work on the page.
After the script is completed the director – which may be you the scriptwriter - will make another more detailed storyboard. It may be reworked many times before it is actually used on the set. It is rarely necessary to storyboard every single moment of the film. People take different things from a storyboard. For example, the lighting director will worry if he sees that some scenes have the main characters in large hats – it could be difficult to light faces under big hats.
The storyboard has a direct relationship with the script; both will be revised constantly, but it is the director’s job to see that the storyboard is up to date. A storyboard is vital in the preproduction stage. The storyboard should be as simple as possible, giving an outline of the action, with shot size, camera movement and a few indicative lines of dialogue. You should not draw a frame for every movement or action. An average-length scene of two pages might take up eight frames or one storyboard sheet.