My understanding is that final draft is generally considered the industry standard in terms of programs. I haven’t actually used it myself because I don’t have a few hundred bucks to spend on software, but it’s the normal one.
Personally, I use the free version of Celtx, since I do not have much money and quite frankly need to get myself a job.
As for formatting, there’s a ton of books and stuff on that. I think the book I was using earlier this year was called The Screenwriter’s Bible, but I haven’t gotten around to looking through the entire thing yet so I can’t attest to how amazing a guide it is. I don’t really know what your best guide to that would be.
If I could throw my two cents in? We’ve used “the screenwriters bible” in my screenwriting classes and it does have the most comprehensive formatting I’ve seen. Celtx is good and yeah, final draft is expensive ( i was lucky and got it on discount). I think maybe scrivener has a screenwriting mode too, but I haven’t used that.
Probably the most important thing to remember when writing screenplay is that you don’t necessarily want to ‘direct’. You can describe, but give the actors/directors room.
All good advice. And that’s the second person tonight who’s mentioned scrivener, so I guess that could be worthwhile.
The BBC writersroom website also has some PDFs demonstrating a number of scripting formats.
Here is a link to the writersroom. I like reading the Doctor Who scripts, heh. They also post various writing opportunities too.
There’s also the internet movie script database, but the format isn’t always 100% because it isn’t in pdf form.
And if you’e in the sherlock fandom, Losyark wrote “To A Stranger” from MadLori’s “performance in a leading role”, and it’s quite good.