Screenwriters Secret Weapon #1: The Transition Pass

Transform your script into an award-winner with only a few extra hours perfecting your transitions.

Everyone is worried about the rewrite. Personally, I love to rewrite. It’s the main reason why I vomit out a first draft as quickly as I can and spend more time on the polish drafts. You can’t know what will work and what won’t until you throw words together in a specific order and see what happens.

One of the key elements to any good rewrite, is the transition pass.

Craig Mazin, of the Scriptnotes podcast, reminded me of an episode they did on this subject in 2013, which may or may not have been where I learned this. You should check it out.

HERE’S HOW IT WORKS

You finish the draft of the script and tidy up all your spelling, grammar and other mistakes, especially that one time you wrote seven entire pages calling the main character by a different name.¹

Now that the hard part is complete, you go through each page but you only look at the text before and after each slugline.

You’re looking for:
1) Are you going from a close up to another close up without intentionality?
2) Does each slugline have description after it? Naked…