


The goal is to parcel out your story, to really slow things down and get into the small details of things you just don’t have time for in a film. My pilot took place just in one week of her life. My feature script spanned two years of my protagonist, Ada’s, life.
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To be clear, your first act of the feature screenplay is not your pilot, but simply the part of your feature script from which you will mine most of the TV pilot. It is where you introduce all your main characters and set up the central conflict in the story.

The great thing about TV is that instead of telling your entire story in a tight, two-hour window, you now have somewhere between eight and 22 luxurious hours to tell that story, depending on the number of episodes you end up having.įocus on the first act of your feature script. 'Peaky Blinders' Recalculate Your Timeline I also used it as a template to help me know where to break my acts. Because the show is very similar in tone to my feature script, it was incredibly helpful as a guide to how much plot and action to include in each act. The teaser may introduce the protagonist, sometimes the antagonist or a sticky situation the protagonist will be forced to deal with later in the episode.Īs I was adapting my historical feature script set in Victorian England into a TV pilot called Ada and the Machine, I studied the pilot script for Peaky Blinders. The acts are separate from the teaser, which is the opening one to three pages at the very beginning of the show. Some have as few as four acts and some have as many as six, so it’s really up to you. The number of acts just depends on the show. Networks like HBO don’t have commercials and neither do the streaming services, but you should still think about breaking your story into acts because it will help both you and the reader understand exactly where they are in the story. Traditionally, these acts allow for commercial breaks on network (and some cable) TV channels. Most TV drama pilots are between 55 and 65 pages and are broken down into acts. This is the first step to familiarize yourself with the hour-long format on the page. Read More: What is a Spec Script (and Why Should You Write One)? Read Pilot Scripts in the Genre of Your Spec Here are some things to keep in mind as you go through the process. If you don’t have a spec TV pilot, now is the perfect time to turn your best feature spec script into an hour-long TV pilot.Ĭonsidering you have already created the characters, world and tone of your feature-length story, adapting it to TV pilot form is just a matter of reimagining your structure. Since the pandemic, streaming networks like Netflix, Hulu and Peacock have been thriving and actively seeking television content because if there’s one thing people have liked to do in the age of COVID it's binge-watching great shows With Hollywood backlogged with movies, selling your spec feature script is going to be challenging at best, at least for a while.
