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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. |
| Each 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: |
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SERIES OF SHOTS - JONES RUNS ACROSS MANHATTAN
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A) |
Dodging dogs on leashes in
Central Park.
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B) |
Weaving through stopped traffic
at Times Square, dodging a bicycle messenger.
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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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