GlossaryCraft technique
Montage
A montage is a sequence of short shots, presented as a list, that compresses time or shows a process — training, falling in love, a city waking up. In a screenplay it is headed "MONTAGE" and broken into lettered or bulleted beats, each a single image, often scored to carry the passage of time.
A montage condenses a stretch of story time into a rhythm of brief images. On the page it reads as a labelled block — "BEGIN MONTAGE" / "END MONTAGE" — with each beat written as a one-line fragment.
Montage differs from a series of scenes in intent: a montage is about accumulation and time passing, where the individual shots matter less than the cumulative effect. It is a structural shorthand, not a substitute for a scene that needs to play in full.
BEGIN MONTAGE: -- SAM tapes cards to the wall. -- Coffee. Dawn. More cards. -- The wall is full. Sam steps back. END MONTAGE.