Film and Screenwriting Editing and Proofreading Services

A screenplay is read before it is filmed, and by people who read a great many of them. A reader working through the weekend pile gives a spec script ten pages to justify the rest, and what turns them off is almost never the story — it is the density. Long paragraphs of action, camera directions the writer has no authority to give, and characters described in a way that tells an actor nothing. The craft is aggressively economical for a practical reason: the page has to move at the speed the film will.

We edit what screenwriters, production companies and development executives produce — feature screenplays and television scripts, treatments, outlines and beat sheets, series bibles and pitch documents, loglines and one-page synopses, coverage and script reports, writer's statements and director's statements, funding and development applications to agencies and broadcasters, co-production and grant submissions, festival and lab applications, pitch decks and look books, format and continuity documents for returning series, and shooting script revisions and revision-colour discipline. Our editors work to standard screenplay conventions and to whatever house format your production or funder requires.

Action description is where a script reads fast or dies, and the fix is nearly always cutting rather than rewriting. Four lines describing a room become one line naming the thing the scene needs; a paragraph of what a character is feeling becomes what they do, because a camera cannot photograph an interior state; a sequence of shots becomes a sequence of events, since the writer directing the camera on the page is spending the reader's goodwill on a decision that is not theirs to make. We work through scripts marking every action block over four lines, every adverb doing the work a verb should do, and every "we see" that could simply be the thing seen. The test is whether a page takes about a minute to read, because that is the convention the whole industry prices and schedules against, and a script that reads at ninety seconds a page is telling a producer something about its budget before anyone opens it.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unproduced material, projects under option and submissions in progress. We are editors rather than agents, producers or script consultants; we do not assess commercial prospects, provide coverage, or offer notes on story structure unless you ask for a developmental read. What we can do is make the pages clean, correctly formatted and fast to read.