Want to be a better screenwriter? Learn to love commercials.
With March Madness upon us and baseball season just around the corner, I can’t help but wonder – when does football season start? Only then I can get away a constant bombardment of commercials during every timeout, whistle, foul, substitution, or half-court-shot-promotion-for-some-poor-guy-to-win-a-scholarship-he-shouldn’t-have-to-need…but I digress. The only chance to watch a decent sporting event virtually commercial-free is the first weekend in April. Thank you, Augusta National! (Brought to you by IBM, AT&T, and Mercedes-Benz).
Football season means good commercials, and if you want to write better screenplays, you should learn to love commercials. That’s right, I said it: learn to love commercials.
“That’s crazy!” you’re thinking, but is it? Consider the idea for a second. A screenwriter must pack as much story as possible into the fewest number of pages. No one cares if you’re a wordsmith – story and economy are paramount.
And if those rules hold true, then aren’t thirty- and sixty-second commercials just the ultimate in short-format storytelling?
The opening hook of a feature-film has roughly ten minutes to grab you and and keep you in your seat. A short allows for maybe half that time, but a commercial has mere seconds to grab viewers’ attention and keep people from changing channels or running into the kitchen for refreshments. So think about the last commercial you saw, and ask yourself, “Was the commercial any good?” Regardless of whether or not it prompted a purchase decision, commercial copy writers must know how to tell a good story, quickly, in order to influence viewers to emotionally align with a brand.
In any given year, there are hundreds of thousands of spec scripts floating around the industry. The average reader will give a script only a few minutes before deciding to pass or consider moving it up the chain. How can you make your script stand out?
Make it an unbelievably great read. Make it a page-turning masterpiece the analyst can’t put down. In other words, grab them from the first couple pages.
