A Feather In Her Cap, a complete MLP:FiM Episode Script

Hey gang,

As promised, I have uploaded and made public the My Little Pony episode spec script I have been working on during this semester. I'd love to see what you guys think of it. The script itself is based off Be Like Her with some significant changes, both to fit the subject matter and structure of a real episode. It is also written in a professional format; this is extremely close to the real scripts written for the show itself.

Read it here.

Feel free to ask any questions about it. I intend to spread this around a little in the next coming weeks. One of the things that spurred me to write this was the abysmal writing quality of the "fan episodes" (Double Rainboom, Button Mash, etc), which made me think, "I could do much better than this." The other was that series "spec" scripts were one of the supported projects for my second-year dramatic writing class, and FiM fit my professor's criteria for an acceptable show to write a spec script for (fairly recent, popular, and will likely be on the air for a few more years). I'm not sure if I'll end up writing more pony scripts, but I will definitely be writing scripts of some form over the next several years.

You can find a production of act three in my previous blog post.

To clear some things up formatting-wise:
- The teaser is the short clip played before the opening theme.
- Acts are between commercial breaks; an act ends, it fades to black for 1-3 seconds (adjusted based on episode length), and a commercial plays.
- Minus the opening theme and closing credits, episodes are just under 21 minutes long.
- Normally, scripts are a page a minute, but according to Amy Keating Rogers, pony scripts are between 30 and 33 pages. I guess the writing style and it being an animated series shortens the time it takes to show a page on the screen.
- When I interrupt a paragraph of action to write something in all caps on its own line, that's a shortcut to tell the storyboarders that what I'm writing about is incredibly important. This technique is probably in the script every time we see an extreme closeup of an object in the series.
- Again regarding shortcuts, action appears sporadically paragraphed, because each time a new paragraph occurs, a new shot is implied.
- A lot of the very tiny details are implicit and not in the script. Pretty much every wingboner and funny face is done by the storyboarders or animators.

I think that should cover things that might be unfamiliar to you regarding script writing conventions.

Thanks for reading!

Comments

[iloveportalz0r]

[Wanderer_Of_TheDusk]

Congratulations on completing the script! I hope that you had a great time with it and imagined that you learned some things during its production. I'll take a look tomorrow and give you my thoughts on the matter.

[GaryOak]

1617029
Thanks! I hope you like it.