How to Write a Montage in a Screenplay (With Examples)

Sooner or later every script needs to compress time: the training weeks before the fight, the summer the couple falls in love, the investigation that fills the corkboard with red string. The montage is how film does it, and figuring out how to write a montage in a screenplay trips up more writers than almost any other formatting question — mostly because there isn't one single sanctioned montage format. There are a few accepted ones, they're all fine, and what actually matters is that the reader glides through the sequence feeling time pass. Here's the whole toolkit.

The Two Main Montage Formats

The first decision is between a MONTAGE and a SERIES OF SHOTS. The distinction is soft, but the tradition goes like this: a montage compresses time and usually carries an emotional through-line (often scored with music in the finished film); a series of shots compresses information — quick beats in roughly continuous time, like a chase glimpsed across several streets.

Format one: the lettered montage. A slug announcing the montage, then lettered beats:

MONTAGE - JUNE TRAINS FOR THE MARATHON

A) June jogs half a block, stops, hands on knees.

B) Dawn. She runs past the bakery. The BAKER waves.

C) Rain. She runs anyway, soaked, grinning.

D) She crosses a bridge at sunrise, stride easy now,
   a different runner entirely.

END OF MONTAGE

Some writers use dashes instead of letters; both are accepted. "END OF MONTAGE" (or "END MONTAGE") is optional if the next scene heading makes the return to normal scene-writing obvious, but it costs one line and removes all doubt.

Format two: the series of shots. Identical structure, different label:

SERIES OF SHOTS - THE HEIST TEAM PREPARES

-- Gloved hands load a duffel bag with rope and drills.

-- Marcus memorizes a blueprint, eyes closed, tracing air.

-- A vault door, photographed from a passing "janitor's" cart.

Format three: the multi-location montage with mini-slugs. When each beat needs its own location established, use abbreviated scene headings under the montage banner:

MONTAGE - THE LETTER CROSSES THE COUNTRY

INT. CHICAGO POST OFFICE - DAY

The letter tumbles into a sorting bin among thousands.

EXT. HIGHWAY 80 - NIGHT

A mail truck barrels through Nebraska rain.

INT. SEATTLE APARTMENT LOBBY - DAY

The letter slides into box 4C.

END OF MONTAGE

This hybrid is common in modern scripts and completely legitimate. Since each beat has a real slug, some writers skip the MONTAGE banner entirely and just write a run of very short scenes — which brings us to the honest secret of the whole topic: a montage is really just a sequence of tiny scenes, and any formatting that makes that clear is correct. Consistency within your script matters more than which variant you pick. If the mechanics of slugs are still new to you, scene headings explained covers the underlying rules.

Pacing on the Page: Make It Read Like It Cuts

Formatting is the easy half. The craft half is rhythm. A montage exists to move fast, so the writing has to move fast too:

• One image per beat. Each lettered line should be a single, shootable picture. If a beat needs three sentences, it's a scene pretending to be a montage beat.
• Escalate. The beats should progress — skill improving, relationship deepening, evidence mounting. June jogging half a block in beat A and crossing the bridge "a different runner" in beat D is the story. A montage whose beats could be shuffled without loss isn't a montage; it's a slideshow.
• End on the button. The last beat should land the point of the sequence, ideally with a turn — the final image that tells us what changed.
• Keep it short. Most montages earn half a page to a page. If yours runs three pages, either it's carrying story that deserves full scenes, or it's padding. Remember that a page is roughly a minute of screen time — the one-page-per-minute rule applies to montages too, and a three-page montage is a three-minute music video in the middle of your movie.

Dialogue inside a montage is allowed but should be scarce — a shouted line, a toast, a repeated instruction. The moment characters hold a conversation, you've exited montage logic and the reader feels the gears grind.

What the Great Montages Teach

Think about the montages everyone remembers. The training sequences in Rocky work because every beat is measurable progress toward one concrete goal, capped by an unmistakable button — the top of the museum steps. The opening of Pixar's Up tells an entire marriage in a few wordless minutes, and it works because the beats rhyme with each other: the same hill, the same savings jar, the same tie, aging across decades. Repetition with variation is the engine — establish a visual pattern, then let the changes carry the meaning.

The Rocky lesson: a montage needs a goal. The Up lesson: a montage needs a pattern. If your sequence has both, it will play; if it has neither, no formatting will save it.

One caution from the other direction: montages are seductive precisely because they're efficient, and it's tempting to montage past material that deserves dramatization. Falling in love is the classic trap. A falling-in-love montage works in When Harry Met Sally territory because the film has already done the hard scene-work; the montage compresses more of what we've seen, it doesn't replace what we haven't. If the relationship's key turn happens inside your montage, pull that beat out and write it as a full scene. Compress the repeatable; dramatize the singular. It's a cousin of the show-don't-tell principle: the montage shows a process, but it can't substitute for the moments that change people.

Practical Notes

A few housekeeping details. Montage slugs are capitalized like scene headings, and most screenwriting software will treat them as such — in a free screenwriting app that auto-formats as you type, "MONTAGE - " at the start of a line is recognized as a slug, and your lettered beats format as ordinary action lines, which is exactly right. Number nothing; letters or dashes only. And if music matters to the sequence, resist naming a specific song — "NEEDLE DROP: an upbeat '80s anthem" survives the music-licensing budget; "'Eye of the Tiger' plays" usually doesn't, and readers know it.

Write the beats as pictures, make them escalate, land the button, get out in a page. Do that and nobody — reader, director, editor — will ever pause to wonder whether you formatted it the "right" way. They'll be too busy feeling the time fly, which was the entire job.