Course Outline

1. Introduction – aims and expectations, introduction to short films.
2. Developing ideas - where to get ideas from? What is a screen idea? Shaping your ideas.
3. Developing ideas - working with myths and personal stories.
4. Premise workshop – principles of workshopping, using workshops as a development tool, workshopping your premise.
5. Research – where and how to research for fiction films. The ten story types.
6. Characters and characterisation – creating characters, developing characters, the character arc.
7. Visual style - the writers style and the directors style – how to write in film language. Dramatic form.
8. The short screenplay – key elements present in short film forms, review shorts to identify engaging structures and narratives.
9. Outline Workshop – workshop a series of outlines, articulate why an outline isn’t working, provide solutions to identified problems, identify key problems with your own outline and discuss further development.
10. Scene Writing 1. The mechanics of scene writing – scenes of introduction
11. The feature length screenplay – different approaches to be made with writing a feature, workshop a series of screenplays.
12. Genre – what is genre – identifying genre conventions. How genre can be used in short films.
13. Dialogue. Identify the purpose dialogue serves in a scene, review your dialogue with a view to editing it, writing a monologue.
14. Scene writing 2. Basic functions and elements of a scene in which a decision is made.
15. Draft screenplay workshop – workshop a series of draft screenplays, articulate why a draft isn’t working, provide solutions to identified problems, and identify key problems with your project and how to develop it.
16. Adaptation – issues of copyright, issues in adaptation, undertake the adaptation of a short film.
17. Writing for Television – some of the issues in writing for TV as opposed to film, soap writing, writing tv series.
18. Second draft workshop
19. Selling your screenplay – place your project within the structure of the industry and understand the role of pitching and your ability to do it.
20. 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 this course has helped.

Course Aims