Course Outline
Day One:
Introduction - Aims and expectations, introduction to short films.
Developing Ideas - Stories, Plots and Narrative - Where to get ideas from. What is a screen idea? Shaping your idea into a premise for a film.
Premise Workshop - Principles of workshopping, using workshops as a development tool, workshopping your premise.

Day Two:
Characters and Characterisation - creating characters, developing characters, the character arc.
Visual Style - The writer?s style and the director?s style - expressing them on the page.
The Short Screenplay - Key elements present in short film forms, review shorts to identify engaging structures and narratives.
The Feature Length Screenplay - Different approaches made when writing a feature, workshop a series of screenplays.

Day Three:
Outline Workshop - Workshop a series of outlines, articulate why an outline is not working, provide solutions to identified problems, identify key problems with the project and discuss further development.
Dialogue - Identify the purpose dialogue serves in a scene, review your dialogue with a view to editing it, writing a monologue.
Rewriting - things to consider in the rewriting process.
Scene Writing - looking at the basic functions and elements of a great scene, and how to write key scenes in a feature.

Day Four:
Draft Screenplay workshop - Workshop a series of draft screenplays, articulate why a draft screenplay is not working, provide solutions to identified problems and identify key problems with your project and how to develop it.
Selling Your Screenplay - Place your project within the structure of the industry and understand the role of pitching and your ability to do it.
Next steps - Where to go from here - Understand the basic parameters of any career choice you make. What do you still need to learn and how has this course helped.

Course Aims