Montage vs. Series of Shots: Most Screenwriters Get This Wrong!

What’s the difference between a MONTAGE and a SERIES OF SHOTS in a screenplay? In this tutorial, I break down when to use each one, how they work differently on the page, and how I format them in Final Draft. Using a very serious example involving pickles, I’ll show you how to format a montage that jumps across time and locations, how to keep it easy to find in the Navigator, and how a series of shots works when the action stays within the same scene. There isn’t only one acceptable way to format these sequences, but this is the approach I use to keep the script clean, readable, and easy to navigate. TIME CODES 00:00 – Montage vs. series of shots 00:24 – Examples: Rocky vs. Batman 00:30 – Building a montage 00:52 – Formatting the montage 01:04 – Using dashes for different locations 02:02 – Cleaning up the formatting 02:17 – Putting MONTAGE in the Navigator 02:45 – Formatting the beginning and end 03:23 – Fixing spacing in Final Draft 04:27 – Other ways to format a montage 04:55 – Using individual slug lines 05:53 – What is a series of shots? 06:06 – Montage vs. series of shots explained 06:48 – Formatting SERIES OF SHOTS 07:30 – Why you don’t need a new scene heading