Screenwriting : Rookie screenwriting question abour parallel storylines by William Armstead

William Armstead cheers!

Since you are involved in IT (me too!), I would say be fresh, innovative and direct with your scenes and timelines,

grind your switches and shifts down to the moment (in story time on the page),

get granular and choreograph elements and scenes in your mind and on paper in slow-motion if you have to,

you can imprint devices like timecodes, alternate clothing/costumes/ distinguishing marks, hairstyles and characterization, clocks, phone screenshots and other subtle time-of-day indicators sparingly as timeline markers if you need to;

and definitely use your IT perceptivity to develop the script as if it were software code, with the utmost clarity and exactitude, in sequence, modular and granular, you can always smooth it out and soften it up later.

Perhaps the character's status on a timeline can simply be conveyed by alternate location descriptions / scene headings ?

Maybe there are other unrelated subtle attributes you could use as placeholders while you're focusing on other crucial components of story, so you don't get bogged down trying to perfect the format that will convey this information ?

Yes there are techniques and formats that are textbook, and you will probably also find them helpful, but I would encourage you to first freestyle a clear, elegant and powerful format of your own that is organic to the story and compelling to YOU.

I think it's important to embrace the challenge of innovating prior to cluttering your mind with what's already been done, you will be rapidly advancing in your craft, because that kind of creative attitude is really empowering for the writer.

You'll have plenty of time to refine it later, and I wish you the best of great success getting "RICH JOE," "POOR JOE" and the gang to wherever and whenever they need to end up !!

There is no special formatting for parallel storylines. They're just scenes.

It's the content of the scenes that makes what you're doing special, not the formatting.

Likewise for 'simultaneous' scenes: indeed, a lot of cross-cutting is vaguely simultaneous.

Lacking a phone call from one scene/location to another, the audience never really knows if subsequent scenes are a little later, a lot later, or simultaneous--unless you clearly go from day to night, etc.

I suppose if you really wanted to make clear that a subsequent scene were at exactly the same time as the prior scene, you could put the time on the screen or show a clock. But those are both rather clumsy.

Montage (quick cutting between extremely short scenes or shots) is just handled the way all montages are.

Thanks everyone for your advice, you guys are good.

You could indicate which "universe" is being shown in the scene headings.