Final Draft can help a writer form a plot, organize its structure, create an outline and work out a page budget before writing the first page of a script.. Use the Beat Board to structure the events of the story, use the Outline Editor to organize the acts and scenes, and use Page View to begin writing around the skeleton.
In the example below, the writer has organized her short film into three acts, with each act having three scenes. This story structure has come to look like this after some time was spent brainstorming, adding and removing ideas, and moving them around on the Beat Board until the story was exactly where she wanted it to be.
The next step is to move this story to the Outline Editor, which is a linear representation of the story. The Outline Editor can be used to break down the story into a page budget, which helps the writer know how many pages to allot to each scene. If it’s not visible, go to the View menu and choose Show Outline Editor or choose its icon from the toolbar Home Ribbon.
If the script is intended to be fifty pages long, right-click anywhere in the Outline Editor and choose Change Target Script Length. The default is 120 pages, considered the standard length of a feature screenplay, but this project isn’t feature length. The writer enters 50 and clicks OK. Now the Outline Editor displays a 50-page scale.
Drag the Beat markers for Acts One, Two and Three to the Outline 1 Lane and sizes them appropriately. Act One will go from Page 1 to Page 15, Act Two will go from Page 16 to Page 34 and Act Three will go from Page 35 to Page 50.
Next, drag the scenes to the Outline 2 lane. Each scene will span an average of five pages.
To make it easier to differentiate each scene, right-click a scene marker to assign it its own color. You can also edit the text in the marker and the Beat on the Beat Board will be updated as well.
To make it easier to see, zoom the Outline Editor in or out with the slider on the left right and resize vertically by dragging the bottom border up or down.
Scenes’ lengths can be adjusted once they’ve been positioned, and the page range will be updated in the Beat on the Beat Board.
After the acts and scenes have been fine-tuned for length, create an outline on the script page by clicking the Send to Script button at the left. To see this in action, split the screen vertically with Page View on one side and the Beat Board on the other.
Beat marker contents will be brought to the page based on which Lane they are in -- in the example below, "ACT ONE" is an Outline 1 (Acts) paragraph, "Meet Tangle" is an Outline 2 (Sequences) paragraph and "Set up Gold Key" is an Outline 3 (Scenes) paragraph.
The writer now has an outline on the page, and she can write actual script content around the blue outline paragraphs. Outline paragraphs can also be converted to regular script paragraphs by right-clicking on a paragraph and going to the Change Element to menu.
Outline paragraphs can be hidden by going to the View menu and choosing Hide Outline in Script.
It’s also possible to create an outline without using the Beat Board and the Outline Editor by writing story beats on the script page as outline paragraphs. See Outlining a Script on the Page.
For more information on going from an idea to a rough draft watch the following video:
And read the following article:
"Master the Beat Board and Take Control of Your Script at Every Stage".