The seven screenplay elements

1. Scene heading

Also called a slug line. It tells you where you are and when, in a fixed shape: interior or exterior, location, time of day.

INT. HOSPITAL CORRIDOR - NIGHT

Always uppercase. INT. for inside, EXT. for outside, INT./EXT. when a scene crosses the line — a character in a parked car, say. Time of day is usually DAY or NIGHT; use CONTINUOUS when the action runs straight on from the previous scene, and LATER when time has passed in the same place.

Keep location names identical every time. "HOSPITAL CORRIDOR" and "HOSPITAL HALLWAY" become two separate locations on a production breakdown, and someone will have to untangle that.

2. Action

What the camera sees, written in present tense. Full width of the page, no indent.

A light stutters. MAYA (30s, scrubs) walks fast.

Two conventions worth knowing: a character's name goes in caps the first time they appear, and sound effects are often capitalised too. Keep paragraphs to three or four lines — dense blocks of action are the fastest way to lose a reader.

3. Character

The name of whoever is about to speak, uppercase, indented to roughly the centre of the page.

Extensions go in brackets after the name. (O.S.) means off screen — they are in the scene but not in shot. (V.O.) is voice over, from outside the scene entirely. (CONT'D) marks the same character speaking again after action interrupts them.

4. Dialogue

What they say. Indented, in a narrower column than action — that narrow measure is why dialogue reads fast and is part of how a page equals roughly a minute of screen time.

5. Parenthetical

A short direction inside the dialogue block, in lower case brackets.

(quiet)

Use them sparingly. They are for a delivery that genuinely isn't obvious from the line, not for directing the actor's whole performance.

6. Transition

How one scene becomes the next: CUT TO:, DISSOLVE TO:, FADE OUT. Right-aligned. Modern spec scripts use very few — a scene heading already implies a cut.

7. Shot

A specific camera instruction: CLOSE ON, ANGLE ON. Rare in spec writing, since directing from the page tends to read as an overstep. Useful when the shot itself is the story beat.

Why the shape matters

The margins are not decorative. They produce the one-page-per-minute rule that budgets and schedules depend on. A 110-page script is a two-hour film, and everyone downstream reads it that way.