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A step outline (also informally called a beat sheet or scene-by-scene [1]) is a detailed telling of a story with the intention of turning the story into a screenplay for a motion picture. The step outline briefly details every scene of the screenplay's story, and often has indications for dialogue and character interactions. The scenes are ...
The word "beat" is industry slang that was derived from a famous Russian writer who told someone that writing the script was just a matter of putting all the bits together. In his heavy accent he pronounced bits as "beats". [citation needed] A beat sheet is a document with all the events in a movie script to guide the writing of that script.
A beatscript or beat-script is a scripting aid used for describing story ideas. It offers a level of detail not afforded by the standard feature-film screenplay format. This makes it especially useful for describing short film, animation and short sequence ideas. Its structure is focused on action rather than thought.
Snyder developed two weekend workshops for writers, filmmakers and executives. The introductory class, The Beat Sheet Workshop, helped participants come up with the solid structure of the 15 beats, before they embark on the actual writing of the script. In addition, The Beat Sheet Workshop was expanded to be led internationally.
It's a way of making a product that's likely to work—not a fill-in-the-blanks method of screenwriting. Maybe that's what Snyder intended. But that's not how it turned out. In practice, Snyder's beat sheet has taken over Hollywood screenwriting. Movies big and small stick closely to his beats and page counts.
The next generation of screenplay software hooked into Microsoft Word. Warren Script Application was initially released as a set of style sheets for Word for DOS. It was updated for Word for Windows circa 1988. gScript, a shareware script formatter/template, was released via CompuServe in 1989.
In 2004, screenwriter John August was looking for a Markdown-like syntax for formatting text documents into screenplay form. In 2008, he and Yousefi released Scrippets, a plug-in for WordPress and other platforms that allowed users to embed short sections of a screenplay in blog posts and forums, using formatting hinted from plain text.
Stanislavsky conceived the segmentation of script as a preparatory tool for actors working on a play. Although he used the Russian word for "bit" (kusok) in the drafts he originally made for his planned books, he later preferred to speak in terms of "episode" (epizod in Russian), "event" (sobytie), and "fact" (fakt). [2]