Steve Coombes' Introduction & Soft Short Film Analysis

Today we sat down with Steve Coombes, an external scriptwriter who is coming in weekly to mentor us on the techniques used during the scriptwriting process. He remarked on the 5 major golden rules to scriptwriting.

• Only tell your audience what they NEED TO KNOW. Irrelevant subjects aren't necessary and easily lead your audience to boredom.

• Show your audience, don't tell them. This can be conveyed through scenes, dialogue and behavior, Telling someone an anecdote is never as good as seeing the event play out, giving the audience more credit by leaving them to get the information out of the content themselves. 

• Jokes! Set-up, Distraction, Punchline.

• Know your ending. If you begin writing your screenplay without an end point in mind then you don't know where you're going with the story, leaving yourself open to change your mind during the writing process repeatedly. 

• Count your moments, those moments are the points people enthuse about after seeing the movie - "Do you remember the bit when?! - " etc.

"Every screenplay is a tiny revolution" - this is a reason to be original, stand out from the crowd.