My Films

Module 2 · Lesson 5 of 6

Make your story fit 30 to 60 seconds.

A minute of film holds fewer words than you think. Count yours, then cut until they fit.

The steps

  1. People talk at about 2 to 2.5 words a second.

  2. A 60-second film holds about 100 to 140 spoken words, and fewer with pauses. A 30-second film holds about half that.

Count your words

  1. Count only the words people say out loud. Descriptions of what we see don’t count.

  2. Open the free Dialogue Runtime Calculator. It counts the words for you and times them.

  3. Paste your lines into the box called Or paste the dialogue (optional).

    Lines written like “ROSE: You opened my mail.” work well. It counts who is talking, too.

  4. In Target length, type 1 for a 60-second film, or 0.5 for a 30-second one. Tap Calculate screen time.

    If your scene runs long, the answer says how many words to cut.

Cut until it fits

  1. Too many words? Cut whole lines first, then single words inside lines.

  2. Lines that greet, repeat or explain can almost always go. “Hello”, “Well” and “As you know” are the first to cut.

Your whole book, for comparison

  1. Curious how long your whole book would run as a film? Try the free Book to Film Runtime Estimator.

  2. To see how many script pages it would fill, try the free Book to Screenplay Page Estimator.

    One script page is about one minute of film. Your film needs half a page to one page.

Do this now

Count the spoken words in your scene. Cut until it fits your length.

Open the Dialogue Runtime Calculator

Check yourself

  • Do you know how many spoken words your scene has?
  • Is it about 110 to 120 words for 60 seconds, or about 55 for 30?

If any answer is no, go back over the steps, or look below.

Stuck?

It says my scene is too long.
Cut from the start first. Most scenes begin too early. Then cut any line that says what we can already see.
I don’t know which words count.
Count only what a character says out loud. Descriptions, the names above lines and directions like “(angry)” don’t count.
Pasting my lines is hard on a phone.
Count the words by hand instead, one line at a time, and add them up. Type the total into Dialogue words, and set Speaker turns to the number of lines in your scene.

Still stuck? Email info@bookwriter.vip and say which lesson you’re on. A person reads every message and writes back.