How to Write a Montage in a Screenplay

A montage compresses days, weeks or years into a minute of screen time. This guide shows you what a montage is, how it differs from a series of shots, the formats writers use on the page, how to handle dialogue and music inside one, and when a montage helps your story or quietly hurts it.

Updated September 2026 · 7 min read

1. What a montage is

A montage is a sequence of short moments, cut together, that shows change over time. A boxer trains for months. A couple falls in love over a summer. A team renovates a ruined house. Instead of writing ten full scenes, you give the reader a quick run of images that carries them from one state to another.

The key word is change. A good montage starts in one place and ends somewhere else: weak to strong, strangers to lovers, empty to finished. If nothing changes from the first image to the last, you don't have a montage. You have a list of pictures.

Montages often happen in several locations and across many days. That's what makes them useful, and it's also why they need their own format: you can't write a full scene heading for every two-second image without drowning the reader.

2. Montage vs. series of shots

The two terms are often confused, and many writers use them loosely. The most common distinction is this:

In practice the line is blurry, and readers won't reject a script for choosing one label over the other. Pick the one that fits best and use it consistently.

3. How to format a montage

There is no single official montage format. The versions below are all widely used and all read as professional. What matters is that the reader can see clearly where the montage begins, what each moment is, and where it ends.

The standard version

Open with a heading in capitals, list each moment as a short line, and close with END MONTAGE. Many writers put a short description after the dash so the reader knows what the montage is about.

Some writers write just MONTAGE instead of BEGIN MONTAGE, or MONTAGE - NINA TRAINS as a single heading line. All are accepted.

Lettered items

Instead of dashes, you can label each moment A, B, C. Letters make it easier to refer to a specific moment in notes and rewrites, and some writers find them tidier on longer montages.

Locations inside a montage

When a moment happens somewhere new, you have two options. You can give it a short location, as in item B above. Or you can use a full scene heading for each moment and wrap the whole run in BEGIN MONTAGE and END MONTAGE. The second approach is longer, but some writers prefer it because the production team can schedule each location cleanly. For a spec script, lighter is usually better.

4. How to format a series of shots

A series of shots uses the same structure with a different label. Open with SERIES OF SHOTS, list the moments, and close with END SERIES OF SHOTS. Some writers skip the closing line and simply start a new scene heading; that's also common.

Notice that the heading comes first here. Because a series of shots often stays in one place, it can live inside a normal scene.

5. Dialogue and music in a montage

Dialogue

Most montages have little or no spoken dialogue. When a line is essential, format it as normal dialogue under the moment it belongs to. Keep it short. One line per moment is plenty.

A common alternative is voice-over running across the montage: a letter being read, a phone conversation, a narrator. Put the (V.O.) dialogue before the first item or between items, and the reader will understand it plays over the images. The screenplay format guide covers V.O. and O.S. in detail.

Music

Montages are often cut to music, and it's tempting to name a famous song. Be careful. Licensing a well-known track is expensive, and the director and music team will make that decision anyway. Most writers describe the feel instead:

If a specific song is truly central to the story, some writers name it once and accept that it may change. Just don't build the whole sequence on lyrics you can't guarantee.

6. When to use one, and when not

A montage is a tool for compression. Use it when the audience needs to feel that time has passed and something has changed, but doesn't need to see every step.

• Use it for training, preparation, research, renovation, or a relationship growing over time.
• Use it to skip a stretch the audience can fill in themselves, like a long journey.
• Avoid it for the turning points of your story. If a moment changes a character's decision, it deserves a full scene with conflict and dialogue.
• Avoid it to hide a problem. If you can't figure out how two characters fall in love, a montage won't solve it; it will just make the gap obvious.
• Avoid stacking them. One or two montages in a feature is typical. Several can make the script feel like it's rushing past its own story.

Montages also affect page count. Because they pack a lot of screen time into short lines, they don't follow the usual one-page-per-minute estimate exactly. If you're tracking screenplay length, keep that in mind.

7. Common mistakes

• No change from start to finish. Every montage should end somewhere different from where it began.
• Moments that are too long. Each item should be one or two lines. If it needs a paragraph, it's a scene.
• Forgetting to close it. Without END MONTAGE or a clear new scene heading, the reader doesn't know when the montage stops.
• Directing the camera. Words like "close on" and "we pan to" add clutter. Describe what we see and let the director choose the shot.
• Mixing formats. Don't use dashes for half the items and letters for the rest. Pick one style per script.
• Building it on a specific song. Describe the mood of the music instead of relying on a track that may never be licensed.

That single item holds a backstory, a camera move and a memory. Cut it to what we actually see: Nina stretches in the kitchen. A photo of her father on the fridge.

8. Frequently asked questions