Screenplay Outline Builder
Lay a story out act by act and see where the pages are going before you write them.
Act I — Setup
≈ 28 pages · 3 beatsOrdinary world, inciting incident, the choice that makes going back impossible.
Act II — Confrontation
≈ 55 pages · 3 beatsRising cost, the midpoint reversal, the low point. The half that collapses first.
Act III — Resolution
≈ 28 pages · 2 beatsThe choice made with everything learned, the climax, and what the world looks like after.
What a Screenplay Outline Is For
An outline is the cheapest place to find out that a story does not work. Restructuring an outline costs an afternoon; restructuring a finished draft costs a month, and by then you are attached to scenes that have to go. Every professional structure — three-act, sequence method, Save the Cat, the eight-sequence approach — is a different way of answering the same two questions early: what changes, and on what page.
That second question is the one this tool is built around. Act length is not a rule so much as a symptom: a second act that has taken 70 pages of a 110-page outline is telling you something is unresolved in the middle, and it is telling you now rather than in draft four. The page targets here are computed from the length you type, so a 22-page short gets the same read as a feature.
How to use it
Set your target length, write the logline, then fill in the beats act by act — a beat is one thing that changes, not one scene. Add or remove rows as the shape asks for them. When it reads right, use Print / Export PDF to save a clean copy. Nothing is stored and no account is needed.
This outline is written by you, by hand. The Story Maker's beat board work the other direction as well: point them at a screenplay you already have and they read the beats back out of it, so you can see the structure of a draft you have already written and compare it to the one you intended.
Screenplay Outlines — Frequently Asked Questions
How long should a screenplay outline be?
Anywhere from a single page of beats to a 20-page treatment. What matters is that every entry names a change rather than an event — "she decides to testify" is a beat, "she drives to the courthouse" usually is not.
How many beats should an outline have?
Most feature outlines land between 20 and 60. Fewer than about 15 usually means the middle is still vague; far more than 60 and you are outlining scenes rather than structure.
Why does the tool show page targets per act?
Because act balance is the structural problem you can catch earliest. The conventional 25/50/25 split of your target length is shown as a reference point, not a rule — knowing you are 20 pages over in Act II is useful even when you decide to keep it.
Is an outline the same as a treatment or a beat sheet?
A beat sheet is the shortest form — one line per turn. An outline adds what happens and who is in it. A treatment is written as flowing prose in the present tense and is usually the document you hand to someone else. This tool produces the middle one.
Is signing up required?
No — every field and the PDF export work without an account, and nothing you type is saved or sent anywhere.