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Montage or Series of Shots?

Writers are often confused about how to present a series of short scenes that are illustrative or transitional in nature.  When the shots are so short and disjointed as to make it awkward to present them as scenes, then a “SERIES OF SHOTS” is the answer.

Montages, on the other hand, are usually transitional, with each shot dissolving into the next one, and they often don’t involve the principal characters.  For example, a montage of a flight might include the airplane taking off, dissolving into an animated line showing its progress across a map, dissolving into a shot of the plane flying through the clouds, dissolving into a shot of it landing.

Montages tend to be used less often than a series of shots.  In both instances, the images should not be random, but progress the narrative and build to a climax.

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Standard screenplay format dictates they begin with a slug line describing the content.  It’s not sufficient just to describe them in paragraphs of action.

bulletEach shot must be listed in outline form, without a scene heading, starting with a capital letter “A” and a closed parenthesis, followed by two spaces:

 

 
SERIES OF SHOTS - JONES RUNS ACROSS MANHATTAN
 
 
A)  Dodging dogs on leashes in Central Park.
 
B)  Weaving through stopped traffic at Times Square, dodging a bicycle messenger.
 
C)  Hustling into the Canal Street subway entrance.
 

 

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The text in each shot should wrap beneath the text, not beneath the letter of the outline.  This is essentially a hanging indent.

Unfortunately, most script formatting software cannot handle a hanging indent.  You must insert a hard return at the end of each line, cheat the spacing, and indent manually.  Here’s how you do it in Movie Magic® Screenwriter™:

Move your cursor to the end of the first line in the shot description, and hit “Enter.”  This will start a new action element, double-spaced down.  However, you need to make it single-spaced, and for that you have to cheat it.  Go to “Format | Cheat | Element” and under “Line Spacing” change “Lines Before” from 1.0 to 0.0.  Then hit the space bar four times to indent the line.  If you’ve set the spelling preferences to automatically capitalize sentences, you may also need to change the first word of the line back to lower case.  Do this for every line that wraps in the “SERIES OF SHOTS.”

Creating a hanging indent is somewhat easier to do in Final Draft®:

Move your cursor to the end of the first line in the shot description, and hit “Enter.”  This will start a new action element, double-spaced down.  Go to “Format | Space Before” and select “0.”  Then hit the space bar four times to indent the line.  If the text continues to wrap, hit “Enter” at the end of each line, and add four spaces to line up the text.  If you’re working with existing text, there’s no need to change the spacing for every additional line in a shot.  However, if you’re composing a first draft, hitting the “Enter” key will start a new action element, double-spaced down, requiring you to adjust the spacing.

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Copyright © 2008 by Michael Ray Brown.  All rights reserved.
Last modified: May 07, 2008