Recently, I’ve been reading a lot of consultation scripts with scene issues. Writers are staying inside of their scenes for too long. My advice for this has always been the same. The average scene should be somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5 pages. Anything over that needs justification. If you’re writing a big set piece, that’s justification. If you’re writing the climax, that’s justification. If you’re writing a big confrontation between two characters, that’s justification. Otherwise, you should be keeping your scenes lean and mean.
However, it occurred to me, that as often as I gave this advice, I’d never actually tested it. I was going mostly on feel and, admittedly, the advice that had been handed down to me long ago. So today I decided to change that. Get some real world data. What I did was I chose three screenplays, and counted how long each scene was. I then divided the scenes by the page number to get an actual average of pages per scene.
This process was trickier than I expected. There’s some subjectivity in what constitutes a scene. For example, Deadpool does a lot of bouncing back and forth in time. Sometimes, when we bounce to the past, it’s for an isolated scene. Other times, it’s part of a series of scenes you could argue are one continuous (montage) scene. So I had to use my judgement on which was which.
Also, I didn’t want to break down scene numbers into quarters, as it would get too messy. So if a scene was, say, 65% of a page, I would round down to half a page. If it was 75% of a page, I rounded up to a full page. I didn’t measure down to the millimeter or anything, which, when going through the whole script, gave me some imperfect page counts. That’s why the numbers don’t add up EXACTLY to the official page count. With that said, it’s accurate enough for the purposes of this article.
Here’s what I came up with…
DEADPOOL (ORIGINAL SPEC DRAFT)
1.5, .5, 3, 10, 3, 2.5, 2.5, 1, 1.5, .5, 4, 2.5, 2, 1.5, .5, 2, 4.5, 3.5, 1.5, 1, 2.5, 1, 2, 1.5, .5, 1, 3, .5, 2, 2, 2, 1.5, 1.5, 4, 3, 1, 2, .5, 1, 3.5, 2, 14, 6, 3
Page Count: 113
Number of Scenes: 44
Average: 2.6 pages per scene
THE BABADOOK (SHOOTING SCRIPT)
3.5, 3, .5, 1, .5, 2.5, 3, .5, 1, 3, 1, .5, 2.5, 1, 3, .5, 2, 1, 1.5, 1, 1, 1, 2.5, .5, 1, 1, 1, 2, 6.5, 1, 2.5, 1.5, 2, 1.5, 1, 2, 1, 3.5, 1.5, 1, 3, .5, 1, .5, 1, .5, 3, 1.5, 2, 2.5, 6, 2, 5, 2.5, .5, 2.5
Page Count: 100
Number of Scenes: 56
Average: 1.8 pages per scene
THE HANGOVER (ORIGINAL SPEC DRAFT)
1.5, 4, 2.5, 3, 3, 2.5, .5, 2.5, .5, 5, 4.5, 1, 1.5, 4.5, 1, .5, 3.5, 1, 4, 7, 3.5, 4, 4.5, 1, 1.5, 8.5, 3, 2.5, 5, 1, .5, 6, 2.5, 1.5, 1, 1.5, 1, 2, 5.5, 1
Page Count: 111
Number of Scenes: 40
Average: 2.7 pages per scene
So what did I learn here? Well, writing style has a lot to do with how many scenes you’re going to have. Jennifer Kent (The Babadook) had a lot of brief scenes with her protagonist in a car coming back home. Or sitting in a room while her kid was asleep. She seemed to be drawn to moments, as opposed to writing fully fleshed out scenes.
On the flip side we’ve got The Hangover, which has the most long scenes of our three examples. A reason for that may be that comedy needs to rev up in a scene before it gets going. And also, there’s more dialogue in a comedy, since the characters are making lots of jokes. This naturally leads to longer scenes.
Deadpool is such a crazy script with all the jumping around. But I wanted to include at least one action script. Not surprisingly, the long scenes in the script are the major set-pieces. But I was surprised how short some of the scenes were. I remembered being in the theater and watching Wade Wilson yap his mouth off in a bar for awhile. But in the script, those scenes are under 3 pages.
Despite all of this, the average scene length is surprisingly close to the advice myself and others have been giving. Deadpool and Hangover are a little over 2.5 pages per scene. But that might have dropped had I been stricter about what a scene is and isn’t. Likewise, with Babadook being a very stream-of-conscious type movie, you could make the argument that many of those individual scenes were part of bigger scenes. With those adjustments, all of these movies would be in that 1.5-2.5 page sweet spot for how long the average scene should be.
I want to make it clear though that this doesn’t mean every scene should be 2 pages. A scene should be as long as it needs to be. If all you need to convey is that a character is an asshole, take half a page and show him cut someone in line at Starbucks. Boom, you’re done. But if you’ve got your hero and your villain, who you’ve been building up for 80 pages, finally confront each other in a diner (Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro in Heat), of course that scene should be longer.
What you don’t want is to make newbie mistakes like coming into a scene too early. Or leaving a scene well after the scene is clearly over. I’ll see this happen in comedy specs a lot. The writers want to get as many jokes in as possible and therefore a 3 page scene becomes a 6 page scene with half the impact. The lesson I would take away from today is that if your scene is over 2.5 pages long, there better be a good reason for it. It has to be an important scene in some capacity.
I hope that helps!
Carson does feature screenplay consultations, TV Pilot Consultations, and logline consultations. Logline consultations go for $25 a piece or 5 for $75. You get a 1-10 rating, a 200-word evaluation, and a rewrite of the logline. If you’re interested in any sort of consultation package, e-mail Carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the subject line: CONSULTATION. Don’t start writing a script or sending a script out blind. Let Scriptshadow help you get it in shape first!
