How to Format a Montage in a Screenplay

A montage is a sequence, not a scene

A scene is one continuous action in one place at one time, which is exactly why it earns a slugline. A montage is the opposite: a stack of shots spanning days, months or years, held together by a single idea rather than a single location. So a montage does not get an INT. or EXT. heading of its own. You cannot slug it INT. GYM - DAY when half of it happens on a hill at dawn and the rest happens in a kitchen at night.

What a montage does is compress time. Thirty seconds of screen time can cover a year of training, a marriage, or the rise and fall of a business. That is its entire economic purpose, and it is the test every montage should be measured against: is this passage of time something the audience needs to feel rather than be told about?

The most common beginner error is writing the montage as one long scene with dashes between beats. Keep the beats as separate short paragraphs. Screenplay action is always present tense and always in the moment, even when the moment is a summary, so no beat inside a montage is written as something that happened and finished.

The MONTAGE header, and the BEGIN MONTAGE wrapper

The header form replaces the slugline: MONTAGE sits flush at the action margin in ALL CAPS, followed by a blank line and the beats. A subject after a hyphen on the same line is a common courtesy, since the reader wants to know the theme of the sequence before reading it:

MONTAGE - MARCUS TRAINS

    Marcus runs the same hill. Daybreak.

    Noon. Marcus runs the hill.

    Night. Marcus runs the hill.

    Boxing gloves, new, in a store window.

    Boxing gloves, split at the seam.

    Marcus runs the hill. Snow now.
END MONTAGE

The wrapper form brackets a longer passage so the scenes inside it only need ordinary sluglines:

BEGIN MONTAGE

INT. RECORD STORE - DAY

Dev unpacks crates alone.

EXT. LOADING DOCK - NIGHT

Dev loads the van himself.

INT. VENUE - LATER

The room is full. Dev watches from the booth.

END MONTAGE

Three rules govern both forms. First, the closing line is not optional: END MONTAGE (or BACK TO SCENE) is what tells the reader the sequence has stopped and the next scene is happening now. Without it, the scene that follows reads as one more beat. Second, pick one pair of markers and use them for the whole script — MONTAGE/END MONTAGE, BEGIN MONTAGE/END MONTAGE, or MONTAGE/BACK TO SCENE. Mixing them looks careless. Third, sluglines inside a wrapper stay minimal; if every beat needs a location, a time of day and its own action, what you have written is a run of scenes and it should not be wrapped at all.

Final Draft has a dedicated Montage paragraph element, which indents the beats from the action margin so the sequence reads as a block. If your software does not, do not fight it: consistent short beats at the normal action margin read perfectly well. A tenth of an inch of extra indent has never cost anyone a read.

The competing school: just write scene after scene

Most produced feature scripts contain montages and never use the word. The writer puts a run of very short scenes on the page, each with a real slugline and one or two lines of action, and lets the compression come from the rhythm:

EXT. CITY STREETS - DAWN

Marcus runs through empty intersections.

INT. GYM - DAY

Marcus spars. He takes a punch he used to dodge.

EXT. CITY STREETS - NIGHT

Marcus runs past the arena. The marquee is still blank.

The argument for this school is that montage is an editing term. What you have written is the raw material, and the sequence is built in the cutting room; labelling it on the page tells a director and an editor what they are making before anything has been shot. Short sluglines also read as speed — the reader's eye travels down the page the way the film will cut.

The argument against is that a run of headings implies many locations and many setups, and it can read as choppy when you want a single continuous feeling. A header tells everyone this is one unit, to be cut to a rhythm, often to music or voice-over.

Dominant practice: use a header when the beats are fragments of a single repeated action or an unbroken passage of time in one emotional space, and use short sluglines when the beats are actual moments in actual places. Television and animation lean on the header more than features do, because those sequences are timed early and the header communicates the intent to the whole department at once.

Pacing the beats, and how long a montage should be

Standard formatting is calibrated: 12pt Courier, single-spaced, gives six lines to the inch and about 54 lines of text to a page, which is why one page of screenplay lands close to one minute of screen time. Count the montage before you write it.

Keep each beat to one line for as long as you can. The moment a beat runs to three lines of description, the reader stops experiencing it as a cut and starts experiencing it as a scene, and the sequence stops compressing. Parallel construction is what makes a montage read as a rhythm: the same sentence shape repeated, with one detail changed each time, does more work than any adjective.

Something must change across the sequence, and the last beat should be the one that changes. Established pattern, repeated pattern, broken pattern is the shape of every montage that works. Ten beats in which the same thing happens with no escalation is a list, and a list is the fastest way to make a reader skim.

Two things to leave out. Do not write dialogue in a montage: dialogue is a formatted element with a cue and a block, and the moment characters speak to each other you have written a scene or an intercut sequence instead. Voice-over is different and perfectly normal over a montage, because it is one continuous track rather than an exchange. And do not direct: naming a camera move per beat is wasted breath in a passage that will be cut to music. If you want CLOSE ON somewhere, put it on the one beat where the shot carries the meaning.

SERIES OF SHOTS, INSERT and CLOSE ON

These get confused with montage constantly, and they compress different things.

SERIES OF SHOTS - THE SEARCH

A) Dev kicks open the door of a storage unit. Empty.
B) Dev rifles a filing cabinet. Nothing but invoices.
C) Dev tears a poster off the wall. A key, taped behind it.

BACK TO SCENE

Use SERIES OF SHOTS for a chase, a search or a sweep — several locations, one continuous moment. Use a montage when the point is elapsed time. If the beats cover both, pick the one that matches what the audience should feel, because the two read differently on the page and are scheduled differently by a production.

INSERT is for information the audience must actually read and the scene's shot scale cannot deliver: a headline, a text message, a name on a form. Old scripts insert everything; modern practice is to insert almost nothing, because a clear action line already tells a director to get the shot. When you do use it, name the object on the insert line and put the content in the action below it:

INSERT - PHONE SCREEN

MARCUS: don't come to the fight

BACK TO SCENE

CLOSE ON is written constantly in produced scripts and much more rarely in spec drafts, because it is a camera direction and a script full of them reads as a shot list rather than a story. The working standard: if the shot carries information the scene cannot carry another way — a face deciding, a hand letting go — it has earned its line, and nothing else needs one. A montage is the one place where a camera note costs you nothing, because the beats are shots by definition.

When a montage is a writing crutch

Three tests, in this order.

1. Delete it. If the script reads the same without it, it was decoration. Montages are the cheapest thing on the page to write and one of the most expensive to shoot, so anything that does not survive deletion is costing you goodwill for nothing.
2. Name what changes. A montage should deliver a change — competence, distance, decay, love. If it delivers information instead (they moved to Portland, he got the job, the dog died), you have written a paragraph of exposition and then dressed it as film. Exposition belongs in a scene where a character can react to it.
3. Ask whether the hard part is on screen. If the character's transformation is the reason the film exists, a forty-second training montage skips the only thing the audience came for. Montage is for the part of a process the audience already understands; it is not a way to avoid dramatising the part they do not.

Three shapes that are almost always crutches: the getting-ready montage at the top of a scene; the first-act establishment montage that shows the protagonist's ordinary world in eight shots when one well-written scene would do it better and cost less; and the rise-and-fall montage that steps over the second act's plot because the writer could not work out how the business actually succeeded.

A page of montage is twenty setups in the reading, which for a first assistant director means a full shooting day and possibly more locations than the rest of the act combined. That asymmetry is why producers read the word with suspicion, and why a montage that compresses exactly the right year of a character's life — the one the audience cannot be told about, only shown — is one of the most efficient pages you will ever write.

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