Essentials of screenwriting

Course details

This print-to-screen course gives the fundamentals of screenwriting to novelists, short story fiction writers, playwrights and others wishing to adapt their stories to the screen. We start with the building blocks of visual story telling, from creating loglines to shaping characters and giving the story dramatic form and structure.

We will also do some writing exercises to get participants to break away from novel-style in-the-character’s-head type writing, to writing scenes which the audience can see and hear.

Course Outline

Day 1

• Pitching the Story
• Loglines, Synopsis, Treatments to interest producers
• Dramatic 3-Act Structure
• Aristotle’s Unity of Action
• Beginning, Middle and End (Linear and Non Linear)
• Developing Characters: Social, Physiology, Psychology, Motivation, Character Flaws, Character Development Exercise
• Main Story Elements
• Inciting incident, foreshadowing and payoff, crisis, resolution, denouement
• Writing sluglines
• Locations and Props
• Difference between writing a theatre play, a tv script, a short film script, a feature film script
• Silent Scene Writing Exercise

Day 2

• Refining the Pitch
• Main Story Elements Part 2: Location and Prop Writing Exercise, Using Sound, Writing Visually
• Action Descriptions: Making us see the film, feel with the characters
• Dialogue Writing Exercise
• Screenwriting Format
• Collaborative Writing