Screenplay format, element by element

Last updated August 2026

Screenplay format is stricter than prose formatting, and for a more practical reason: a correctly formatted page of screenplay runs roughly one minute of screen time. Every margin in the format exists to protect that ratio. Change the margins and you change what a producer thinks your film costs.

There are only a handful of elements. This is each one, what it does, and where it sits on the page.

The page

Courier is load-bearing here. The one-page-per-minute convention is calibrated to it, and a proportional font breaks the estimate immediately.

The elements

Scene heading (slug line)

Flush with the left margin, in capitals. Three parts: where the camera is, where the scene is, and when.

INT. FARMHOUSE KITCHEN - NIGHT

INT. for interior, EXT. for exterior, INT./EXT. when the scene moves between them — a conversation through a car window. Time is usually DAY or NIGHT; use DAWN, DUSK or CONTINUOUS when the difference matters to the shot. Anything more specific belongs in the action, not the slug.

Every slug line is a setup: a location to find or build, and a lighting condition. That is why a script's slug lines get counted before anyone budgets it.

Action

Flush left, full width, sentence case, present tense. What the camera can see and what the microphone can hear. Nothing else.

Mara sets down the kettle. Outside, headlights sweep the wall.

Keep action paragraphs short — three or four lines at most. A dense block is the clearest signal on a page that a writer is describing a novel rather than a film. Capitalise a character's name the first time they appear, and capitalise significant sounds and props if you want them noticed.

Resist directing on the page. We PUSH IN on her face tells the director their job. She does not look away tells them what matters, and lets them find the shot.

Character cue

Indented about 3.7 inches from the page edge, in capitals. The name of whoever is speaking.

An extension goes in brackets after it: (V.O.) for voice-over — narration from outside the scene — or (O.S.) for off-screen, meaning the speaker is present but not in shot. They are not interchangeable, and using V.O. for a character shouting from the next room is the single most common formatting error in a first script.

Parenthetical

Indented about 3.1 inches, in brackets, lower case, on its own line under the character cue.

                    MARA
              (not turning round)
          You're early.

Use them rarely. A parenthetical is for something the line cannot carry on its own — a delivery that inverts the words, or an action mid-speech. (angrily) in front of an angry line is telling the actor something they can already read.

Dialogue

Indented about 2.5 inches from the left edge, and roughly 2.5 inches wide. The narrow column is deliberate: it is what makes dialogue-heavy pages run at the same pace as action-heavy ones.

Transitions

Right-aligned, in capitals, ending in a colon: CUT TO:, DISSOLVE TO:, SMASH CUT TO:.

Modern spec scripts use very few. A cut between scenes is assumed — a new slug line already means the picture changed. Keep a transition for when the cut itself is doing something.

Shots

Flush left, in capitals: ANGLE ON, CLOSE ON, POV. Same advice as transitions, more so. In a spec script these are usually the writer reaching for the camera.

Continued dialogue and page breaks

When a speech breaks across pages, the convention is (MORE) at the foot of the column and the character cue repeated with (CONT'D) at the top of the next page. When a character speaks twice in a row with action between, the second cue takes (CONT'D).

This is fiddly to do by hand and worse to maintain, because inserting a line anywhere above it moves every break below it.

Revision marks

Once a script is in production it is locked, and every change after that is tracked. Revised pages carry an asterisk in the right margin against changed lines, and each revision round gets a colour in a fixed order — white, blue, pink, yellow, green, goldenrod, buff, salmon, cherry — so a crew can tell at a glance whether they are holding the current page.

You will not need this for a spec script. You will need it the moment anyone shoots one.

The mistakes readers notice first

• A proportional font. Visible from across a room, and it breaks the page-per-minute estimate.
• Camera directions everywhere. Reads as inexperience faster than any other habit.
• Long action blocks. Four lines is a lot; eight is a novel.
• V.O. where O.S. belongs.
• Parentheticals on most lines. They should be rare enough to be noticeable.
• Transitions between every scene. The slug line already did that work.

Formatting that maintains itself

None of this is difficult, and all of it is tedious to hold by hand across a hundred and ten pages — particularly the parts that move, like continued dialogue and page breaks.

Write Flow Studio handles screenplay elements as you type, with accurate pagination so your page count is a real runtime estimate rather than a guess. It carries (MORE) and (CONT'D) across page breaks on its own, supports revision locking with industry-standard colours once a draft is locked, and exports to PDF and Final Draft .fdx.