AN INFORMAL gathering of writer mafia types last night (some heap big Dons among the bunch, real five families stuff) and talk turned to a common topic:
How many pages is an hour, now?
I remember marvelling a few years ago at how Aaron Sorkin's West Wing teleplays could run sometimes 70 pages. And everyone said, "well, of course, that's what you get when everybody talks fast and walks down halls and interrrupts each other."
The first few shows I wrote for, the aim was to write 52-55. On Across The River To Motor City, we aimed for the 50-52 page range but consistently found our timings coming up short.
Blood Ties ran 52-53 and there were some timing issues, but generally it was okay.
So it was last night that a Canadian showrunner spoke about his recent series and revealed that, even at 60 pages, timings would come up short. We found the same thing on The Border.
Here's the problem: once a script leaves the story department, it becomes about math. How many scenes, how many days, how long to schedule it. In Canada, you have fewer days to shoot. Whether you're doing an 8 day, 7 day, or 6 1/2 -- you're constantly fighting that battle between how many pages can we shoot -- we can't shoot/board more pages, and we can't be short.
A lot of things have contributed to the shortness -- faster editing and camerawork, a general "pick up the pace" style, a recognition that traditional slower Canadian pacing was killing us... but it doesn't help you with that eternal conundrum.
So, all you lurking hour long writers here -- Canadian, mostly, but we'll let you Yanks and Brits play too. What's your page count these days? (and yes, WGA members, I know the answer to that for you is zero. Very funny.) And how many scenes?
Half hour writers, same question. And finally, how are your timings doing?
Leave your answers in the comments below.
8 comments:
The truth is it's not page count that kills you. It's the numbers of locations. Once you've set up a shot, having the actors emote for another fifteen seconds costs you almost nothing. Especially on video.
No across the board answer. The most recent thing I did ran about 50 real pages and had about 60 scenes and the rough cut came in at 63 minutes.
gulp. after a harsh trim we were still sitting at around 52 but at the end of the day it wasn't page count but scene count that contributed to the length.
back on traders we'd run about 58-65 pages but there was a lot of intercuts and "buy -sell, you're bustin' my balls patter" that would fly -- especially with McKenna, Leavins, Hewlitt et al.
it would of course slow to a glacial pace when cubitt was around and as for sonia...
my half hour madison's often got to about 35 pgs but we kinda moved like lightening thru that series on bondertown I brought every script in at 28 and 3/4 pages but that was mostly because I was being a smart ass and challenging myself to make every script exactly the same length (the kind of thing you end up doing when you've been in the room by yourself too long).
a lot of it does depend on the type of series you are doing. if you are cutting hard out of, and into, dialogue because you are looking for "verbal juxtiposition" you can probably still write upwards of 60 but if you're trying to keep some of the tags and tails for atmosphere I'd hang around 50 and change but I'd say standard working length is 52-55.
We're a half-hour show but dealing with the same issues. The law lately has been 27-28 pages, no more than 32 scenes... establishers not included.
In the UK most of the shows have different page formats,
On ones I've written on an hour can run to 45 scenes and up to 110 pages, a half hour 30 scenes and up to 65 pages. Depends on the show and the page format.
They tend not to use screenplay format.
Production often freaks out unnecessarily at page lengths (even if it's just dialogue in a standing set).
They also get mental about numbers of scenes (even if they're all pops back to the same location).
But the real killer is a lot of pages with a lot of characters. That demands coverage for everyone and sets everyone's "overtime meter" meter to red alert.
cg runs about 33 pages, with the old-faghioned "cut to's" still in them and there are always (it seems) timing issues.
scenes are all over the map because of swish cuts etc. set ups i guess should be counting i don't have a firm thought on that.
great review in the globe today
Alex and blueglow pretty much sum it up. For one hours, on Psi Factor, Outer, and Earth:FC the target was always 50-52 pages and a serious attempt to keep it around 40 scenes...but most of those shows were being shot in six days (Outer 7 1/2). Half hours Mentors and renegade 28-30 pages but generally around the same number of scenes, but renegade always tended to come in way long because they kept a lot of tops and tails.
I'm just looking at fourth season Blue Murder that was 71 pages and 50 scenes. Instant Stars run in the high 20s on both scene count and page length. On Metropia, you'll be amazed to note, we shot 30 pages every day with a count of between 15 and 20 scenes -- but never more than 4 locations and only 8 or 9 characters and NEVER any wardrobe changes to slow us down.
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