Whenever you start a new panel, select the 'Normal' style, and the Panel Number will be populated automatically. See the greyed out Panel Numbers? That's because they belong to the same level of a Multilevel List: a level designed for Panel Numbers. My updated version of Fred Van Lente's script template. Multilevel Lists solve these problems, because the numbering is automatically generated by Word. Plus, if you cut a page or a panel and paste it elsewhere in your script, you’ll have to renumber everything manually. Typing numbers is boring, and there’s always a chance you’ll make a mistake. A comics script has many numbered pages, panels, and word balloons. Why should you care about Multilevel Lists? Because they save you time and they make formatting your script a breeze, that's why! (Don't worry, you won't need to learn how Multilevel Lists work to take advantage of them).Ī Multilevel List is a way of automatically numbering sections in a document.

OK, I've probably lost most of you right there. The only problem is, I've already got my script template set up how I like it with Word's Multilevel Lists function. It looks great, but it could be easier to use. Van Lente's format is good and clean, you can fit more information onto a single document page without it getting cluttered, and it even has the thumbs up from letterer extraordinaire Nate Piekos.įred Van Lente's excellent comics script format.

I think I might make the switch-over too. I updated my comic scripting tutorial with 's classy script template and examples: But yesterday, Jim tweeted that he'd switched to Fred Van Lente's script format. Since I started writing a comic script last year, I've been working with the script format used by Jim Zub on Skullkickers ( pdf of an example Skullkickers script on the Comic Book Script Archive).

Comic life 3 templates