# Scriptwriting Case Study: How I Wrote a Full Screenplay from Scratch | Step-by-Step Guide

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Bloop Animation
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABdgosrfop0
- **Дата:** 02.01.2024
- **Длительность:** 31:57
- **Просмотры:** 6,444

## Описание

Welcome to my journey through the world of screenplay writing! 🌟 In this video, I share my entire process of creating a screenplay from the initial idea to the final draft.

Learn more about writing a screenplay in our Screenwriting Foundations course: https://www.bloopanimation.com/screenwriting-foundations/

What You'll Discover in This Video:

The Spark - How I came up with the idea for my screenplay.
Outlining the Story - The methods I used for structuring my story and developing characters.
Drafting - Insights into my writing routine and how I tackled writer's block.
Revising and Editing - The steps I took to refine my screenplay, including feedback incorporation.
Final Touches - Preparing the final draft and what comes next.

Why Watch This Video?
Real Insights: Get a genuine, behind-the-scenes look at the screenplay writing process.
Practical Tips: Learn strategies and techniques to apply to your writing.
Inspiration: My journey is filled with ups and downs – perfect for anyone needing a motivational boost in their creative endeavors.

📌 Timestamps:
0:00 - Introduction
00:56 - The Idea
3:22 - Learning to Write a Film
5:02 - Writing a Screenplay
5:36 - Outlines and Beats
8:48 - Keeping Notes
9:42 - Knowing Your Ending
10:32 - Writing Habit
12:30 - Motives and Stakes
14:46 - Theme
15:38 - Originality Tips & Tricks
22:50 - The Villain
23:40 - The Sidekick
24:42 - Rewriting
28:03 - The Main Issues with My Script
31:04 - Finishing the Script

#ScreenplayWriting #ScriptwritingJourney #CreativeWriting #FullScriptGuide



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## Содержание

### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABdgosrfop0) Introduction

Over the span of about a year and a half. I wrote a screenplay for an animated feature film titled Snow Lands. That script was eventually adapted into an award-winning bestselling graphic novel. So in this final lesson, I'll go over my own process of writing, rewriting and refining that screenplay. I'll discuss how I came up with the idea for the film, how I learned to write a screenplay from scratch, a few methods I found to make my story better and how I used feedback and coverage services to refine my script. The screenplay for Snow Lands ended up placing a numerous writing competitions, a second rounder in the Austin Film Festival and a quarter finalist at the academy called Fellowship. If you're on the path of writing your first screenplay, I hope you get some value from learning about my own experience, and if you're an experienced writer, you might still get a couple of interesting ideas and methods for refining your craft. The following is everything I recall from writing 108 pages screenplay for the first time. In a few words

### [0:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABdgosrfop0&t=56s) The Idea

snow lands story revolves around three main characters, an outcast wolf cub named fba, a snow leopard loner named Usha and a palace cat named Batou. They each face their own challenges and against all odds find themselves on a journey together. Through the harsh, snowy mountains of the snow lands on their journey, they face deceptive creatures, obstacles, and uncover mysteries. Through all of these adventures, they come to understand the true meaning of family and friendship. I thought of the idea for snow lands after watching an episode of Planet Earth, which featured the elusive and magical snow leopard. The episode followed a snow leopard mother and her cub as they traversed the Himalayan Mountains. The mother-daughter story of the two leopards was so moving that I thought it would be a great story for a film in its original incarnation. The idea for snow lands was meant to be just that a mother snow leopard and her daughter on their final journey together before separating for the rest of their lives. Snow leopards are solitary creatures and are destined to spend their lives alone when the cop is ready to separate. I thought that angle was so powerful that it was the only part about the story that remained when the script was done. It was always going to be about a mother and daughter going their separate ways. That notion remained at the core of the film, but pretty much everything else I thought this film was going to be ended up being different. The leopard mother daughter became a leopard finding a stranded leopard cub. Then it lost wolf cub, and then the story changed to feature the wolves as the main animal group in the film with only one leopard. The story still revolved around the leopard and the wolf Cubs relationship still focusing on the mother-daughter dynamic, but it wasn't at all what I thought the story was going to be, and that is the first lesson I learned about writing a screenplay. The story tells you what it needs to be. You can't force it into why you imagined when you first started writing. You have to be okay with losing characters, changing them, switching genders, turning villains into friends and the other way around. I wanted a film about a leopard mother and daughter walking the snowy mountains talking about their feelings. Instead, I got a wolf cup running away from her pack joining a leopard loner who is searching for a mysterious sirus. The final logline of the script is when fate brings them together. An exiled wolf c and a snow leopard loner are thrown into a wild adventure and a must work together to free the snowy mountains from an unexpected threat

### [3:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABdgosrfop0&t=202s) Learning to Write a Film

learning to write a film. When I started writing the film, I quickly realized I have a lot to learn if I want to write a great screenplay. Coming from animation, I don't have any official training in film writing, so I had to create my own curriculum. I decided to create a well-rounded film writing education program that relied on three pillars, reading screenwriting books, reading screenplays, and watching movies. This system worked well for me because it allowed me to completely immerse myself in film while accommodating my different moods and schedules. When I had time and attention span to read, I would read one of the screenwriting books for my list. When I wanted something more fun and wasn't up for schoolwork, I would read a screenplay of a great movie, ones that I watched and ones that I haven't, and when I wasn't in the mood to read anything, I'd simply watch a movie in a similar genre to the film I was writing and try to analyze the structure and character development. One important thing to keep in mind is that I did all of that while writing the screenplay. That's an important point because we won't be able to remember everything we learn. So it's always best to be able to implement ideas in our own project quickly while it's still fresh in our head. Also, it's best to focus on screenplays and movies that are similar in tone and genre to the ones that you're making so you can make sure to hit important beats that are common in specific genres. Alternatively, you can explore other genres and try to find interesting ways to integrate beats from different genres into your script. To spice things up, the important thing is to have a certain project in mind when you're in learning mode so that you can always relate what you learn to the work you're doing, but also make sure to keep making progress on your script and not just use learning as a procrastination tool. The process of writing a screenplay

### [5:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABdgosrfop0&t=302s) Writing a Screenplay

it's common advice to get through your first draft as fast as possible so you'll have something to work with and I agree, but how should you go about writing it? Do you outline the whole story or just wing it? How much of the story do you need to know before you start? how it ends? What about theme? Should you use index cards and post them on the wall? Maybe use beat sheets. Let's go over some of these concepts. If you'll be familiar from other lessons in the course, but I still wanted to mention them so you'd see how I use them in my own work.

### [5:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABdgosrfop0&t=336s) Outlines and Beats

Outlines and beats. Outlines are great. It's always easier to write when you have a map to go by, but good outlines are hard to write. You don't always know everything that happens in your story, and when you're a first timer who's never worked with outlines before, it's even harder. I had that problem. I wanted to start with an outline, but I got stuck pretty quickly. My solution was to outline other movies. I chose a few movies that I thought were similar to the type of movie I wanted to make. Movies like up Shrek, finding Nemo and others. I then watched them and outlined them without getting into specifics, so instead of writing, Nemo loses his wife and all of his children except for one which leaves them scarred and paranoid. I wrote a past incident which determines character a's trauma. I use genetic terms like character A and incidents so that I can look at the film structure in a pure way and figure out what makes it work. This isn't about copying in other movie's ideas, but rather getting an idea of what a successful outline looks like so I can get a clue to building mine. A great book to read for this stage is Blake Snyder's, save the Cat. Some screenwriters won't appreciate this recommendation since Snyder simplifies all movies into basic formulas, but I think this book empowers new writers and helps them see that most good movies have a lot in common. The book can get a bit shallow in its attitude towards writing, which is why it gets a bad rap, but if you build on top of that and not simply take a formula and squeeze your movie into it, it could be a really fun first book on your screenwriting journey. An important element discussed in this book is beats. Beats are major story moments like set up catalyst break into act two or Bad Guys closing in. When you read the breakdown of all the movies covered in the book, you see how similar the timing of those moments is in different movies. I suggest keeping these beats in mind as you write your outline. Again, this should be served as a starting point or a guiding light. You will change most of it by the time you're done. I learned that it was harder to know what to write in the outline the further I got along in the story, so I didn't get much past the halfway point in outlining before I jumped into writing. Then I went back to the outline, changed it based on what I wrote, and tried to keep outlining as much as I could before getting stuck again and going back to writing the script. Here's an example of a few beats from an older outline of snow lands opening image in the wolves den, establishing that the sheep are all gone and the food is getting scarce open. With the Tiger story scene, mom sacrifices herself. Feba is the only one, not with the other cubs because of her white hair. Feba gets away first, villain appearance, the rodents get orders from manga, find the white cub heroes meet Feba meets. Usha wants to go with her, convinces her and follows her. As you can see, these aren't very detailed. They just general scene instructions that describe the flow of events. There's no dialogue or acting direction. Going back and forth between writing and outlining is what worked for me, but many writers do great with outlining the entire script in detail or not outlining at all and simply write the film. The important thing is to discover what works best for you and do that instead of making yourself work in a way that's not natural to you. Keeping notes

### [8:48](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABdgosrfop0&t=528s) Keeping Notes

it's crucial to keep a document that allows you to write notes and ideas, preferably in a way that you can organize them easily. I used Scrivener for all writing except for the actual script for which I used Final Draft. Scrivener is great because it lets you work on multiple text documents and view them on the sidebar simultaneously. That way I could visually access all of my different documents like character names beats different outlines and playing around with theme ideas, tile ideas, and anything else I can think of that I want to put down in writing. I refer to these documents often and I always have them open while I'm writing. I also have a to-do list app on my phone because I often have random ideas popping into my head in random times, like after a shower or during a dog walk, so I make sure to write them down on my snow lens list as soon as I can, otherwise I quickly forget them. A lot of these ideas don't end up being used, but a few of them were my most creative ones. Knowing your ending

### [9:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABdgosrfop0&t=582s) Knowing Your Ending

do you need to know how your film ends when you write it? I don't think you do. I think it's good to have a general idea of where you're trying to go just so you don't get lost in the woods, but you don't need to know the specifics of your ending. You might know parts of it or what you want the ending to feel like happy, sad, ambiguous, but you don't need to know exactly what it is or how you get there. Stephen King wrote in his excellent writing memoir on writing that a writer's job is to tell the truth. I try to follow that mantra. If you commit to telling the truth, then it might be hard to know exactly what happens at the end before you get there because you might not know what happens on the way until you go through the character's journey. I didn't know which of my characters would die. I didn't know how they're going to win the day. The important thing to me was to make sure they have a strong want and that the stakes are high enough. Everything else will figure itself out. Writing habit.

### [10:32](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABdgosrfop0&t=632s) Writing Habit

One of the most important things to do when writing a screenplay is to write Consistently. such a complicated task and taking long breaks from it will make it harder to keep track of the stories flow and development. I'll go even further and say that it would be incredibly harder to finish your script if you don't make it part of your daily work schedule. I understand that writing full-time isn't realistic for everybody, including myself, but try to recognize your most creative hours of the day and get at least two hours of uninterrupted writing, preferably even four or five. For me, it was always the first half of the day I found that my creativity went downhill after lunch, so I try to get as much of the writing done as possible before then, and then work on less mind absorbing tasks. Don't get overwhelmed by the amount of work that's left to do. Take your script one scene at a time. Focus only on the section you're currently working on and only look at the big picture once every few days to see if you're going in the right direction. Don't think about it. Constantly decide what the next five to 10 pages of your screenplay needs to cover and work on that. The important thing is that you are slowly but consistently edging your way to the finish line when you're done, when you actually get to the ending of your screenplay, it's really just the start. Next comes the hard part. Rewriting getting. To the end of the screenplay for the first time is amazing. It feels good and it's really hard to do, but unfortunately, rewriting is much harder and takes longer. It's where you turn your screenplay from, okay or good to great and amazing. I can't overstress this and it is the only statement I can make with absolute certainty. It is only by rewriting over and over again that a script can become great. There are no shortcuts. There is no way around it. I'll get into what the rewriting for snow lands looked like in another part of this lesson, but for now, let's take a break and discuss some concepts and ideas that could help improve your script.

### [12:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABdgosrfop0&t=750s) Motives and Stakes

Motives and stakes are two concepts I always try to keep in mind when working through the script. Many times when writers run into issues with their story or they don't know what happens next, it is because the motives aren't clear enough or the stakes aren't high enough. In other words, it's not super clear what the characters want and it's not that big of a deal if they don't get it or simply stop and turn back. When writing a mainstream screenplay, we have to make sure our main characters, both the protagonist and the villain have a clear want. There is something they're trying to do and more than that, we need to make sure that if they don't get it, their lives would be ruined. Otherwise. What stops them from turning back when things get tough? Have you ever watched a movie and thought, why doesn't he just do X? Or why does she even care if Y happens? This happens when the motives aren't clear and the stakes aren't high. We need to keep pushing our characters so that turning back gets harder and raise the stakes as we progress through the plot. If the character is in a more dangerous situation in the first half of the script than they are in the second half, where is the rising tension? How do we keep the audience interested? Here's an example from snow lands. I struggled with these issues during the first draft. It wasn't always clear what feba the protagonist wolf Cub wants in an early draft. The reason she ran away from her pack was due to an attack on the wolves den during which her mother was killed. Then she kind of found herself following Usha, the snow leopard, and it wasn't really clear what she wants now. Why didn't she just go back to her pack? What's her goal now that she escaped the attack? It wasn't really working, so I solved that issue by making her an outcast In her pack, she had white fur, which the wolves believed to be bad luck, and when things go bad, the pack blamed it. On PBAs, bad luck. She found out that they planned to kill her in order to get rid of what they believed to be a curse that she causes, so she runs away. She had no choice. That solved my problem in a few ways. First, we know why she didn't simply go back home after running away. She couldn't return to the tribe that wanted her dead, and second, I found a strong want for her character, the need to belong to find a place to call home. She never truly had that, always feeling like an outsider, and so she finds that home with Usha giving us a strong motive to follow her

### [14:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABdgosrfop0&t=886s) Theme

theme. You don't need to know your theme going in, but once you discover it, ignore it at your own peril. Neil Gaman said something similar stating that the point of the second draft is to make it seem like you knew what you were doing the whole time. So if I mix both of these ideas together, I'd say that as writers, we discover important things about our story as we write it, and then when we do find those things, we should go back and push those discoveries further while removing the excess fat. Once I discovered that my film deals with parents refusing to let go of their children, I could go back and try to push that idea further by including other cases and examples of parenting showing what happens when you don't let go of your children or what happens if you let go too easily or what happens when you let go the wrong way. I found a theme and went back to push it harder, and with that my theme was developed and refined originality, tips and tricks.

### [15:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABdgosrfop0&t=938s) Originality Tips & Tricks

I'm not going to presume to teach originality as it's a rather vague concept, but I can go over a few ways. I found to make the set pieces in my story a bit more unique and interesting. Many times in our writing we encounter a trope. A trope is a known situation that we've seen before in films from similar genres. They're not necessarily cliches as they aren't silly or overused, but there's something the audience expects to see. Here are a few examples. A group of heroes planned their final attack on the bad guys and we see a quick montage of all the steps they're about to take like in Ocean 11 or other heist movies, A quick mission at the beginning of spy movies. Introducing the hero through a super cool action sequence. The hero bursts into a long speech at the end of a romantic comedy explaining how they now see things differently because of their love interest. These tropes can easily become cliches if done wrong, but even when they're done right, they might not rise above just being okay or passable. And the thing is, whenever we get to writing a scene like that, we automatically go to writing what we expect to see or what we think the audience expects to see. In other words, we write the first thing that pops to our heads. One trick to creating more original scenes is to assume that the first idea you have of how this scene should go, should be discarded. Try to come up with three to five more ideas. If you dig deep, you might be surprised to find some interesting unknown tropes. I used to ask myself, have I seen something like that or have I heard a line like that before? And if the answer was yes, I just changed it just enough. So it has its own unique flavor. So let's say you need the hero to say to the villain, you won't get away with this, but have you ever heard that line in the movie before about a thousand times. So how about I want you to focus on this moment right now, and when I find you know that this is the moment that sealed your fate, fine. It's not a great line, but look how much more unique it sounds and it has the same effect as what we were looking for. Examples from snow lands. Here are a few examples of how I try to add a bit of uniqueness and originality to Sno lands. There was one scene where the wolf council had to take vote on an issue. The way I initially had it was the first idea that popped to my head. The wolf leader asked the council to cast their vote and they all say yes or nod their heads or something like that. This is a familiar scene that you've probably seen in different movies, a character trying to change the minds of some council or Congress and the council votes against their idea To make this scene my own, I added just a few little things to make it unique. First, I decided to give this ceremony its unique, specific language. The leader will first ask, is this what the council wish for? And after the vote is cast, he will say, A wish has been made and the council shall fulfill it. This specific quote will come back at a later part of the movie and it feels just unique enough to make it believable that this tribe has its own set of protocols. It wasn't just cast your vote and fine, let's do it. It followed a very specific procedure and that emphasizes how the leader is reluctant executing this action but has no choice because of the tribe's rules. Then for the voting itself, instead of having the wolves simply answer, they would howl one after another as a method of casting their vote. It's different and specific enough to the story to make it feel unique. Another example is there was a scene where Feba is in captivity with other characters. When she talks back to her captors, I wanted to have her punished somehow by the captors. My first idea was to have one of the captors hurt her. Not badly, but enough to get the point across. We've all seen that scene before. The bad guys capture a hero. The hero talks back to them, they punch 'em in the face, he smiles, spits some blood and remains resolved and says something like, is that all you got? So I wanted to avoid that. Instead, I had a captor who always speaks softly and kindly and I had her saying, when we are out of line, it's our friends who pay the fine. So during the first part of this line, Feba still has her badass do your worst face on. But when the surprising twist comes revealing that she won't be heard, but in fact one of her friends will, her face shows fear for the first time. That was a much more effective way to create fear in the audience as well as increase our hate for the captors. A protagonist getting punched for talking back didn't do much to evoke emotion, but accidentally getting someone you care about hurt does. You can see how those little touches can increase the uniqueness of your screenplay. Even if it doesn't make it super original, it at least makes it feel different enough to stand out. Dialogue, writing dialogue is a whole world of its own and not one that I'm an expert on. I actually think my dialogue, writing skills are rather basic, but I did try to follow some guidelines that I set for myself to give my screenplay a unique voice. Never heard it before. The first rule I set for myself is one I mentioned when I talked about originality. The rule states that if I feel like I heard a certain line in the past, I rewrite it. I always ask myself, what is a unique way I could phrase what I want the character to say? How can I phrase it in a way that the reader would feel they stumbled upon something new, unique voices. The second rule I try to follow is making sure each character sounds different. Make it so that if I take away the names in the script, you'll still be able to tell who's saying what. It's pretty common for all. To sound like the writer because they're all written by the same person, so I try to find little ways to make the major characters have their own way of talking. Usha, the snow leopard would always be cold, direct and short. She's not going to use one word more than she needs to. She's not going to have a sense of humor. She doesn't try to pander or be cute. She is who she is fba. The Wolf Cup on the other hand, is a child. She's naive, sarcastic, warm, and funny. And as for the villains, I have one who's a strong and silent type and one who is a soft-spoken psychopath type. Knowing these traits allowed me to have limitations in the vocabulary and phrasing of my characters. I knew what I can and cannot do. That alone is a huge help. Simply knowing that a character isn't supposed to be funny makes it easier for me to know how they would say something. And then when the script is done, it's a good idea to go back and go over all these lines for each of the characters individually just to check that they all match and none of them feels out of place. It might take you to the end of your screenplay to find the voice for a character. So go back when you're done to make sure the earlier lines still fit. Rules of Speech. Another decision I made early on is that the language the animals used in the script would not include any human made references, but only natural oriented words. What I mean by that is that the characters should talk using words and phrases that exist as if they never heard human talk. That means I couldn't use sayings like, you can't have your cake and eat it too, or don't judge a book by its cover. My characters don't know what cakes or books are, so they can't say it, but it gets even harder. They also can say weeks or months or years because they are manmade ideas. I also avoided numbers higher than 10. Since these animals probably couldn't fathom such quantity. The hardest part was not being able to use. Okay, since its meaning came from different human cultural origins, I could say fine or great, but not okay. That limitation helped me further form my dialogue and world building. Creating such limitations that make sense for your story is a great way to have a more unique sounding screenplay.

### [22:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABdgosrfop0&t=1370s) The Villain

The villain don't miss the opportunity to create a great villain. What makes a great villain in my opinion, is having a very understandable reasoning for their actions. So much so that in their eyes, they're the heroes of the story. Their motives are very clear, and we can even understand why they're doing what they're doing, even if we don't agree with their methods. In my earlier drafts, my villain was more of a monster. He couldn't talk. He'd eat wolf's cubs heads right off their bodies. He was just a madman trying to take over the world that needed to change. After discovering my theme, which was parents not letting go of their children, I reworked the villain into a grieving mother who's trying to get her child back. She goes about it in all the wrong ways, twisted by sadness and hate, but she's coming from a place we can understand that made her into a much more compelling character and improved the story. Overall

### [23:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABdgosrfop0&t=1420s) The Sidekick

the sidekick animated films have a long history with the amusing sidekick, Abu Timba, Olaf Mushu, and many others. They're often used as a comic relief aimed to make kids laugh or sell toys, but they could be much more than that. Snow Lands also featured a cute and amusing sidekick character bat to the Palace cat, but I honestly never really thought about him this way. To me, he was a real character with the past, a want and a meaning to the story. Batou helps push the parenting theme by attaching himself to Feba the wolf cub, making her kind of his guardian or parent. He reveals her caring nature. We also learn about what he went through and why he chose to follow Feba and his unique skill helped save the day later on in the story. So yes, he is funny and cute and he does play a smaller role, but he wasn't an afterthought thrown in there to fill a predictable trope. He was a needed part of the story's puzzle, one that I wouldn't have included if I didn't have a good reason to. Can you say the same thing about Rapunzel's Pascal rewriting?

### [24:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABdgosrfop0&t=1482s) Rewriting

Now that we're ready to take our script to the next level, let's finally talk about rewrites. After finishing our script, we might have some thoughts about what wasn't working in the story, so we go back to fix what we see, but what about the issues we don't see? There's only so much you can find on your own as a writer, so you're going to need some help. That's where getting outside feedback comes in, getting feedback. We all know feedback is important. You show the script to a friend or two, they say, oh, that's great, and you move on. That's not the kind of feedback I'm talking about. I believe the best course of action and the one that I found most effective is getting a lot of paid feedback in the form of script Coverage. Coverage is an industry term that refers to a short review of a screenplay, usually done by assistants, interns, or paid readers. If the review is a positive one, then it's passed on to the higher ups for consideration. It's how studios and agents screen through the thousands of scripts they get every day. Coverage uses a system that labels your script in one of these three ratings pass, meaning they didn't like the script. About 95% of scripts get this rating consider, which means the script needs work, but they can see the potential for a great film. About 4% of scripts get this rating and recommend, which means they believe the script is ready for production. Only about 1% of scripts got this rating paid. Coverage services review your script in the same manner, but in a simulated environment and without the risk of burning yourself in front of an agency or a studio, they write a thorough review of your script in the same format, and agency would often by people who do this for a living, they write about your scripts weaknesses and strengths. They score it on multiple aspects and give it a rating of either a pass, consider or recommend. Paying for feedback might seem like a controversial recommendation as these services differ greatly in quality and some of them can get quite expensive. Also, we don't always know much about the qualifications of the reader, but the reason I recommend using them is because if you submit to a bunch of different places using multiple readers at a time, you start to find repeated issues with your story and know rather quickly what needs to be fixed. This isn't a cheap path. These services charge anything from $50 to 200 for a single coverage, but I can say without a doubt that the only way I personally got my script to the level of refinement that I did receiving numerous recommends placing first on the blacklist under animation and making it as a quarter finalist in the Academy. Nicole Fellowship is by submitting it to three to four readers at a time for each rewrite phase, consolidating all the comments, fixing the issues, and repeat. My script. Started out with a bunch of passes featuring reviews that tore my story apart, but I simply focused on the repeated issues and slowly fixed them. When I finally got to a point where I was getting only considers and recommends, and the reviews didn't have many negative things to say, I knew I was done. The reason this is so effective and better than asking your friends to read it is that these are professional non-biased readers who don't care about you or your script, and that's exactly who you want to get feedback from, not a friend who never read a script in their life and who doesn't want to hurt your feelings. If you do have friends in the industry, however, professional writers, then they could be a great resource as well. But again, you can't expect the same amount of depth from a review your friend gives you, although some might, and there's always the issue of hurting your feelings or hidden competition that may affect the review. The main issues with Snow Lens

### [28:03](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABdgosrfop0&t=1683s) The Main Issues with My Script

I went through three major rounds of rewrites with a bunch of smaller ones in between. I saved all the different coverages I received over time and looking back, these were the main issues. The script struggle with too many characters. There were too many characters, some of them performing the same story functions as others. Many characters were either removed or consolidated. This actually still remains somewhat of an issue with the final draft of the script, but I decided that I'm okay with having an above average number of characters in my story, characterization and motives. I mentioned it before, but in earlier drafts, it wasn't clear why the protagonists were doing what they were doing. Why is Feba following Usha? Why does Usha want to help Feba, or why do they accept each other so quickly? There were no specific characterization of the main characters and no flaws too. That was resolved by adding a traumatic backstory to Usha and making Feba an outcast. I also increased the tension between them, making them more different and even disliking each other at first, slowly building their relationship over time. Who is the protagonist? I always saw this story as Usha, the Snow leopard story, but since I opened with Feba, the Wolf Cub readers always assumed that she was their protagonist. That created confusion when the plot suddenly leaned more heavily towards Usha. This was a hard one to fix, but I ended up accepting Feba as my protagonist while keeping it somewhat of a two protagonist film. Similar to Tory's story or Finding Nemo, I pushed FBAs story further and made the plot more balanced between the two of them. Who is it for? I know that I got time and time again was about the darkness and violent nature of the script. I never imagined this as a kid's movie, but since it's animated, people automatically assume it's a PG film in the spirit of Lion King. At first, I fought back, but since this came back over and over again with real professionals telling me No studio will produce something like that, I thought I should at least try to see if there was something I could do. I toned down the graphic scenes and brought it to a place that is between pg and PG 13. I personally think this film will do better with a PG 13 rating, similar to Star Wars or the Avengers movies, but I left Wiggle room, so it would be easy to turn it into a PG film if we need to. That way if a studio says they'll green light it, only if I make it pg, I'll be able to do it pretty easily. The title, the original title for the screenplay was US Leopards. That was from when the story featured mostly Snow leopards in it, and the two main characters were leopards. But even so, I heard multiple people saying This is a bad title. One said that he thought it was like us leopards as in leopards in the United States. Others simply didn't like it. I liked it a lot. I still do, but if everyone else has such an issue with something like a title, you better consider changing it, and I did. And honestly, snow Lens is a much better title. Writing and format. My first drafts had so many format issues. It was embarrassing. After getting so much feedback on the format itself, I learned what is okay and not okay to do when writing a screenplay. A lot of it is what I covered in this course. Finishing the script

### [31:04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABdgosrfop0&t=1864s) Finishing the Script

after a year and a half of writing and rewriting, I eventually had to decide it was time to stop. There's always more you can do with your script, and there's always more issues you can fix, but knowing when to stop is as important as knowing when not to stop. When I was done with the writing, I sent my finished draft to get proofread twice to make sure it's a hundred percent typo free before submitting it to competitions and agencies. This was a daunting and scary journey. I wrote the story practically from scratch three different times. I spent months rewriting almost full time, but when the screenplay was finished and in a good place, I realized this is now something I can do again and again. I was confident that I could finish an entire screenplay. I hope this recollection of my experience was helpful and that if you are writing a screenplay for the first time, you now feel like finishing it is more possible than it seems. Thanks for watching.

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*Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/18153*