Screenplay Formatting Examples: Every Element on One Page

Page setup and the title page

Every element below is positioned by a number, and the numbers come from the US Letter standard that Final Draft and the industry settled on decades ago. Set them once and nothing else in the script has to be decided again:

Courier 12 point sets 10 characters to the inch, so the numbers are also column positions. In the code blocks below, a line starts at the action margin, column 1, and column 60 is the right margin: a character cue sits at column 23, dialogue at column 11 and wraps by column 45. The title page example is set against the full 85-character page width instead.

The title page is unnumbered and carries only the title, the credit line, and contact details. The title block sits roughly a third of the way down the page; contact details go at the bottom left.

                                    THE LAST FERRY

                                      written by

                                      MARA VOSS



               Mara Voss
               [email protected]
               (555) 555-0100

Only the title, the credit line, and working contact details belong here. No date, no copyright notice, no images, and no production company logo on a spec script — those are the marks of a project that has already been set up.

Scene heading, action line, character introduction

Scene heading. One line, ALL CAPS, flush at the action margin, made of three parts: interior or exterior, the specific location, and the time of day.

INT. FERRY - PASSENGER CABIN - NIGHT

Use a hyphen to separate a master location from a sub-location when the distinction matters to the story, and keep the time-of-day term to one an assistant director can schedule against: DAY, NIGHT, CONTINUOUS, LATER, DAWN, DUSK.

INT. VOSS HOUSE - KITCHEN - CONTINUOUS
EXT. FERRY DOCK - DUSK

Action line. Present tense, active voice, at the action margin, three to four lines maximum. Write only what a camera can photograph, and reserve ALL CAPS inside the paragraph for a character's first appearance and for sounds that matter to the plot.

Mara grips the rail with both hands. The dock lights
slide away behind her. Her phone buzzes in her coat.
She lets it ring.

A horn sounds, long and wrong, from somewhere out
past the breakwater.

Character introduction. The character's name goes in ALL CAPS the first time they appear, with an age range in parentheses and one or two details an actor or a costume department can use. After that first appearance the name is written normally.

A DECKHAND named TELLER (60s, rope-burned hands,
a whistle he never uses) coils a wet line around
his fist.

Introduce a character in caps once and only once. A script where MARA is capitalized in four separate scenes tells a reader the writer lost track of their own pages, and it happens far more often than you would think.

Dialogue, parentheticals, and dual dialogue

Dialogue. The character cue sits alone on its line at column 23; the speech begins on the next line at column 11 and wraps by column 45. Dialogue is never run out to both page margins, and it is never merged onto the cue line, even for a one-word answer.

                      TELLER
          Dock's closed till morning. You'll
          want the cabin.

                      MARA
          I want the deck.

Extensions in parentheses attach to the cue, not to the speech: (V.O.) for a voice that is not present in the scene — narration, a voice on a phone line, a recording — and (O.S.) for a character who is in the scene but outside the frame. (CONT'D) marks a cue that repeats after an action line, and it is optional in a spec script; the version worth skipping is the one typed by hand after every interruption in a scene.

Parenthetical. One line, in parentheses, on its own line inside the dialogue block, directly under the cue. It exists for two things only: a physical action the actor performs while speaking, or a reading that is genuinely ambiguous without direction. It is not a place to write adverbs.

                      TELLER
                (not looking at her)
          Every light on this boat is older
          than you are.

                      MARA
                (quietly)
          Then one of them is lying.

A parenthetical under every speech is one of the fastest ways to look inexperienced, and it also eats page space: two lines of parenthetical is thirty seconds you did not intend to spend. Keep them under roughly one speech in ten.

Dual dialogue. Two characters speak at the same time. The first cue stays where a cue normally sits, the second cue moves to the right of it at around 5.5 inches from the page edge, and both dialogue blocks share the same vertical space. Software exposes it as a formatting command — select the two speeches, then apply dual dialogue — so never build the columns by hand with the space bar.

                      MARA              TELLER
          You knew.                     Everyone knew.

Use it for genuine simultaneity — a fight where both people talk over each other, a group panic, a "jinx" beat — and never for ordinary back-and-forth, which is written as stacked single speeches. One or two uses in a feature is normal; a script full of dual dialogue columns is unreadable and unshootable at the same time.

Montage, INTERCUT phone calls, INSERT and CLOSE ON

Montage. A centered heading names the montage and its subject, each beat gets its own line at the action margin with a leading hyphen, and END MONTAGE closes it. Keep every beat to one visual idea; a montage is a rhythm, not a scene list.

                   MONTAGE - THE CROSSING

-- Deck lights blink out one by one.
-- Mara counts the life jackets. Twice.
-- Teller watches the radar, unsmiling.
-- The wake stretches back toward a dock
nobody can see.

                        END MONTAGE

The hyphen convention is a convention and not a rule — some writers omit the dashes, some number the beats. Whatever you choose, keep it consistent for the whole script, and let the montage do work the scenes around it cannot.

INTERCUT phone call. Give the first location a full scene heading. After the first exchange, a right-aligned INTERCUT WITH: transition introduces the second location with its own scene heading. From there you alternate dialogue without repeating headings; the character cues carry the geography.

INT. FERRY - PASSENGER CABIN - NIGHT

Mara presses the phone to her ear.

                      MARA
          Where are you?

                                              INTERCUT WITH:

INT. WAREHOUSE - NIGHT

A phone screen lights a face in the dark.

                      VOICE (V.O.)
          Closer than you think.

Back on the ferry, Mara stops moving.

                      MARA
          Say that again.

The voice on the other end of a phone line takes (V.O.) in the dominant practice, with (O.S.) where you mean a character standing just outside the frame. Some writers add (FILTERED) or (ON PHONE) when the sound treatment is part of the intent. A second, less common approach condenses the whole sequence into one heading with INTERCUT in the time-of-day slot — INT. FERRY - PASSENGER CABIN - NIGHT (INTERCUT WITH WAREHOUSE) — which is accepted, though the transition line is what most spec scripts use.

INSERT. A flush-left element with a blank line above and below, naming the object, followed by the contents written as action and closed with BACK TO SCENE. An insert does not take a scene heading, because no location changes.

INSERT - THE PHONE

One message on the lock screen:
"Don't take the ferry."

BACK TO SCENE

CLOSE ON. Written inline at the start of an action line, followed by the thing you are looking at and a hyphen or colon. It is a cue to the reader, not a shot list.

CLOSE ON - Mara's hand, white-knuckled on the rail.

In a spec script you can usually fold an insert into an action line — A message blinks on the lock screen: Don't take the ferry. — which reads faster and avoids a page break. Keep the full INSERT device for objects the plot genuinely turns on.

Transitions, page breaks, MORE and CONT'D

Transitions. Right-aligned at the right margin, ALL CAPS. FADE IN: is the exception: it sits flush left at the top of page 1, above the first scene heading, and FADE OUT. closes the script, right-aligned and with a period rather than a colon.

                                               SMASH CUT TO:

                                                   FADE OUT.

CUT TO: is redundant in a spec script, because every new scene heading is already a cut, and good scripts leave it out. Keep the transitions that carry meaning: SMASH CUT TO: for a violent juxtaposition, MATCH CUT TO: for a graphic rhyme between two shots, DISSOLVE TO: for the passage of time. FADE IN: appears once and FADE OUT. appears once — that is the whole count.

Page breaks. When a speech is split by a page break, the bottom of the page carries (MORE) at the dialogue indent and the top of the following page carries CONTINUED: above the repeated cue, marked with (CONT'D). Page numbers sit in the top-right header as a numeral and a period.

                                                          6.

                      TELLER
          Dock's closed till morning. You'll
          want the cabin.

          (MORE)

                                                          7.

                                                  CONTINUED:

                      TELLER (CONT'D)
          I'll wake you at four.

Screenwriting software inserts (MORE) and CONTINUED: automatically when a speech breaks across pages; typing them by hand is only necessary if you are formatting in a plain word processor. What you should not do is put CONTINUED: at the bottom of every page and at the top of the next — that is a shooting-script habit from paper drafts, and readers of spec scripts do not expect it. The page number is the only element that appears on every page.

The five formatting mistakes that get scripts thrown out

None of these are about writing quality, which is exactly why they are unforgivable: they are the ones a reader notices before they have a chance to judge anything else.

1. Wrong font or wrong margins. Courier 12 at a 1.5-inch action margin is the whole basis of page-per-minute. Change it and your 110-page script is not 110 minutes anymore, and the reader who spots Times New Roman on page 1 has already downgraded the submission.
2. Directing from the page. Camera angles, POV, ANGLE ON, and a CLOSE ON every third line. In a spec script this reads as a writer covering for a scene that does not work, and it also tells a producer the writer will fight the director.
3. Action paragraphs that are prose. Anything past four lines gets skimmed, and description you cannot photograph — interior thought, mood, backstory, metaphor — does not read as literary on a screenplay page, it reads as padding.
4. Leftover production artifacts. Scene numbers in the margins, revision colors, bold asterisks, CONTINUED: at the top and bottom of every page, a page number on the title page. Each one signals that the writer sent a production draft instead of a spec draft.
5. Inconsistent elements. A character capitalized in four scenes, a cue spelled MARA on page 12 and MARA VOSS on page 60, dialogue that runs the full page width because it was typed without element control. Consistency is the cheapest thing in the script and the most visible thing to lose.

All five are fixed by writing in an application that knows what a character cue is. In a plain word processor every one of them is a manual decision on every line, which is why format is the last thing that should be occupying your attention while you write.

Frequently asked questions

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More in screenplay formatting

• What Is a Scene Heading? Format, Rules & Examples
• What Is a Slugline? Screenplay Slugline Explained
• INT. vs EXT. in a Screenplay: When to Use Each
• What Does O.S. Mean in a Screenplay?
• What Does V.O. Mean in a Screenplay?
• How to Format Dialogue in a Screenplay
• How to Format a Phone Call in a Screenplay
• How to Format a Montage in a Screenplay
• How to Format a Flashback in a Screenplay
• Screenplay Margins and Font: The Industry Standard
• How Many Pages Should a Screenplay Be?