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What's stopping you from selling your idea? Hundreds of pilots sell to networks and streaming services every year. You can check out Stephen's findings and more charts here! These will always give a more accurate reading.but I don't have any data except experience to back it up. I suggest timing yourself envisioning it or reading it aloud at the pace you want things to go. So at the end of the day, no, the pages don't correlate, but if it helps you begin to time your project in your mind, feel free to use it. Still, no studio heads or companies should be making story decisions based on the number of pages at the end.Īll in all, page length does not account for how well characters arc, if audiences are entertained, or how many awards a movie wins. Especially for beginning writers trying to track their projects. While the very idea of one page per minute is fairly easily debunked, the idea, in general, is still a good one. The chart below shows that most scripts Stephen analyzed fell way out of the "one-page = one-minute" rule. A 50-page script which becomes a 100-minute movie would have a ratio of 0.5, a 100-script and 100-minute movie would have a ratio of 1 and a 100-page script which created a 50-minute movie would have a ratio of 2." I removed any cover pages from the total page count and also removed four minutes from the publicly listed running time of a movie ( my past research has shown that 3 minutes 43 seconds is the median end crawl length). To measure the effectiveness of the rule I looked at the ratio of pages to minutes. Here's what Stephen Follows says was his process, "I built a dataset of 761 scripts which had all been made into theatrically released movies. Okay, so how do you even measure something like this? If you want to go over the data, keep scrolling.
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If you want the TL DR version, the rule is wrong. The '1 Page = 1 Minute' Screenwriting Rule is Wrong He teamed up with Stephen Follows, an esteemed film educator, to do a little research. Still, I've never seen research to back it up.Įnter screenwriting godfather John August. Some contracts even limit the number of pages you can deliver. You might hear something different from producers, who generally want to keep the page count down, or from streamers like Quibi who want to keep their shows under 10 minutes, and thus scripts under 10 pages, but that's the way it goes. I've even written about it for this site. I'm not sure where the idea that "one page equals one minute of screen time" got started, but it's a maxim I heard all throughout film school and my professional life.