![]() It’s to simulate a live performance, and because of that, the timing and delivery of the actors changes. The use of an audience actually isn’t to tell the people at home where the jokes are supposed to be. There’s often a studio audience watching the shoot, or they just use a laugh track. Four cameras shoot the action all at once to get the necessary coverage, rather than getting each angle one at a time with a single camera. A multi-camera (previously three camera) is shot on a stage like a play. MulticamĪ single camera show is one shot like a movie - on sets, locations, etc. And thus, the characters will probably have to be more specific and clearly defined from the get-go. So the stakes become more rooted in the every day and in each other. Yes, this is true for all shows, but in this case they’re not high schoolers who are also on a spaceship. If Freaks & Geeks is a show about what life was like for the outcasts in high school, then the conflicts come from characters and how they relate to one another and their environment. So his job was to choose the characters and setting that would best allow him to express that worldview. He wanted to express how he felt about larger issues through the show and the characters. Aziz Ansari’s Master of None is a show based around his worldview on dating, relationships, and social issues. If your idea for a show isn’t based around a high concept comedic premise, you have other considerations to make. You populate your world to get one hundred half hours of story and conflict so you never have to work again. Who’s the last man on Earth? The man least equipped to survive in the post apocalypse. Who’s the star of your documentary about your supposed everyday office? The most obnoxious, attention-seeking man who ever lived. Who runs Cheers? An alcoholic washed-up ball player. You pair up blowhard intellectual Frasier with his blue collar, no-nonsense father. You pair up true believer Fox Mulder with skeptic Dana Scully. ![]() What you might want to do is consider how your concept affects and influences the world you aim to create with your pilot script.Īlternatively, if the concept of your show is based around a character - an inept bounty hunter, for instance - then what is the situation you can put him or her in that maximizes the comedic potential? What’s going to put this person in the most amount of conflict? Who are the characters you put around them that help or hinder them in resolving their conflicts, internal and external? How is their central problem related to or complicated by the situation you’ve set up? You’ll want to ask who the lead of your show is and how they are uniquely affected by the experience of the premise. If your premise is a show that takes place in a haunted bakery, you’ll want to populate your show with characters who are going to get the most mileage out of that premise. ![]() But what you might want to do is consider how your concept affects and influences the world you aim to create with your pilot script. You probably have some semblance of an idea for what you want to write about if you’ve made it this far. A lot of this stuff will apply to hour long drama, though. I’ll be primarily be talking about situation comedy and thirty minute shows because that’s what I have experience in. I’ve gotten all my work and meetings from my original pilot scripts. I personally have never written a spec script for another show. People probably just got tired of reading Friends scripts at some point. At some point, this shifted to writing an original pilot of your own conception. I get a lot of questions about this stuff, so I figured I would write all my thoughts down.įormerly, the general wisdom was that you should write a spec script (meaning “speculative,” or for no pay) for an existing television show to use as a sample. If you’d like to get a job writing for television (you should - it’s great), here’s how to write a sample pilot to submit to agents, execs, showrunners, etc. ![]() ![]() But at the very least, it makes me good at tricking people into hiring me to write for television shows. This doesn’t mean I’m a better writer than you or even a good writer at all. I have been hired to write for five different television shows, working as a story editor (like staff writer level two) on my fifth series right now. I’ve worked mostly in animation, though I’ve had a couple live action staff jobs, too. ![]()
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