by Lucy Scher
Only by analysing a screenplay, beat by beat, can we really appreciate how rich and textured this writing form is. In this final session we will look at how to compile a scene breakdown, both as an essential learning tool and as a useful method of developing your own story.
This course is limited to just 8 participants.
It is taught by Lucy Scher, one of The Script Factory’s directors.
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STORY DESIGN
A two–day screenwriting workshop aimed to help you work an idea for a film into a solid screen story.
Storytelling is a talent. However, skillful film storytelling requires more than just natural creativity: screenwriters need to learn how to shape a story into one that can be told over 90 odd minutes, keep an audience rooted to the screen for the duration and ensure that everyone is emotionally engaged with the plight of the characters as the story unfolds.
Taught by Lucy Scher and Rob Ritchie, this 2–day workshop considers the essential elements of designing a story for the screen. Whether you’re working at the idea stage or you’re in the process of redrafting, this programme aims to help you ensure that your idea is achieving its fullest potential. Will your story speak to the widest possible audience? Are you using the best cinematic devices to hook the audience in? Have you created a compelling and intriguing story world? Are the characters that populate your story the best ones to serve the idea?
DAY ONE
Defining the Universal Conflict
Screenplays are about specific characters in a specific situation. The films with the most enduring appeal, however, are those that allow the audience to recognise the characters’ problems and predicaments and relate them to their own experience. This opening session explores how to find the universal conflict in a dramatic idea so the audience is personally engaged in what’s at stake.
Framing the Story: Beginnings and Endings
An audience needs to know why they are watching a film and to leave the cinema satisfied that there was a purpose to the story being told. What is it they are supposed to care about? What ending will the story and the audience demand? This session illustrates how to open your story with a clear dramatic question and create an ending that has real impact and meaning.
Cinematic Hooks
Continuing the theme of how to begin your screenplay, this session explores how to give ideas for dramas the big screen treatment by using recognisable hooks from cinematic genres. The session also illustrates how to create external drama to reveal the most intimate internal character journey.
Locations and Story Worlds
In some films the setting of the story is a character in its own right, in others the location is merely a backdrop. Whether it’s the domestic interiors of melodrama or the epic landscapes of action–adventure, the mise–en–scene is the source of the images and metaphors that give the story its meaning. This session examines how choosing the right locations can both clarify the meaning and liberate the cinematic potential of a story.
DAY TWO
What do you want from me?: Matching Characters and Story Types
The way an audience relates to character depends on the kind of story being told. Everyone loves an underdog, but not necessarily in an action–adventure film. The heroines of romantic comedies may not believe that they are worthy of true love but the audience certainly needs to think that they are. This session aims to dispel some myths about what makes a ‘good screen character’ and considers how to make certain your protagonist has the right attributes for their role.
And what do you do exactly?: Secondary Characters
Story design naturally concentrates on the fortunes of the protagonist – the character the story is all about. But how do the secondary characters – the hero’s allies and adversaries – fit into the overall design? This session looks at how identifying the dramatic arc of each character in a screenplay can help to solve problems of plot and structure.
Building a Sequence
Screenplays are routinely discussed in terms of Acts and Scenes. While this allows the main beats of the story to be analysed it obscures the fact that movies are composed of sequences. This session explores story design by illustrating how a sequence is built and addresses the question: how many sequences does it take to make a screenplay?
Story Re–design
This final session aims to leave you equipped to approach your story idea with fresh eyes and offers some useful tools for the continuing development of your screenplay.
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SCREENWRITING UK
A screenplay-writing course designed specifically for writers who are working on a first draft film script but have yet to break into the film industry.
It’s a long way from the computer screen to the big screen, and it takes talent, determination and more than a decent break to get there. The Script Factory has devoted over a decade to working in the gap between new writers and the film industry, supporting writers through the early stages of their career and helping the industry identify and nurture new talent. Screenwriting is, of course, an artistic endeavour but a screenplay is also a product for an industry. Essential to success is an understanding of how the UK film industry works, how a script reader or producer determines the potential of a film idea and an awareness of the script development process.
This two–day screenwriting course combines in–depth teaching on the principles of good screenwriting and invaluable insider knowledge from working writers and producers. It’s designed to provide participants with the understanding they need to turn a strong idea into a well–crafted screenplay that has the potential to attract interest from producers, developers and funders.
DAY ONE
Stories & Genre
This first session considers the universal function of storytelling and examines how cinema audiences recognise and respond to different story types. Confusion over story type or genre is often cited as one of the key reasons why screenplays are rejected. A pile–up in a thriller may add to the excitement, yet a car–crash in a drama might be devastating. An understanding of the subtle (and not so subtle!) distinctions between genres is critical to managing the audience’s emotional response to the events on the screen. By considering the expectations inherent to each genre, we will begin to consider how to develop a screenplay that offers the reader a meaningful and satisfying story experience.
Premise & Conflict
Whether it’s about saving the world or growing up, the success of every screenplay depends on the clarity and strength of the dramatic conflict. This session explores the kinds of problems that a screen character might face and considers how to ensure that the story is invested with enough potential conflict to sustain the tension for the duration of a feature film.
Screenplay Structure
A brilliant screenplay is one that keeps a reader turning the pages from beginning to end and tells that reader that the audience will be glued to the screen for every moment of the film that follows. This session explores the basic principles of structuring a screen story from getting the audience hooked to delivering a satisfying ending.
DAY TWO
Character Journeys
Whether you start off with a dramatic concept and then find characters to dramatise it through or you start with characters and build a story around them, it is ultimately the journey your characters take which defines what your story is. However, different story types require different character arcs – some characters will be forever transformed, some will learn a lesson, others will get their chance to show what they are really made of and a few will simply grow up. This session interrogates what we mean by character change and how you can build convincing character change into your story.
The Controlling Idea
Take a lesson from Shaun of the Dead
Films, like all stories, have a cultural function: to communicate something to an audience that helps them to understand themselves better, or to make sense of the world. The meaning we
take away from watching the film is called the Controlling Idea. This session explores how to identify or determine the controlling idea of a story and how to use this a tool when developing the screenplay.
Treatments, Pitching and The Development Process
This final session explores the development process from sending out the first draft to receiving feedback and planning a rewrite. We will also offer helpful approaches to preparing treatments and a simple guide to preparing a pitch.
Course Tutors
The course is taught by two of The Script Factory’s directors Lucy Scher and Justine Hart.
kamera BOOKS
ESSENTIAL READING FOR ANYONE INTERESTED IN FILM AND POPULAR CULTURE
Tackling a wide range of subjects from prominent directors, popular genres and current trends through to cult films, national cinemas and film concepts and theories. Kamera Books come complete with complementary DVDs packed with additional material, including feature films, shorts, documentaries and interviews.
Silent Cinema
Brian J. Robb
A handy guide to the art of cinema's silent years in Hollywood and across the globe.
978–1–904048–63–3
Dalí, Surrealism and Cinema
Elliott H. King
This book surveys the full range of Dalí's eccentric activities with(in) the cinema.
978–1–904048–90–9
East Asian Cinema
David Carter
An ideal reference work on all the major directors, with details of their films.
978–1–904048–68–8
David Lynch
Colin Odell & Michelle Le Blanc
Examines Lynch's entire works, considering the themes, motifs and stories behind his incredible films.
978–1–84243–225–9
→ Accompanying DVD features Paul Cronin's Film as a Subversive Art: Amos Vogel and Cinema 16, a documentary profile about the founder of the New York Film Festival and America's most important film society
→ Includes previously unpublished interviews with Jill Sprecher (Clockwatchers), James Mangold (Walk the Line) and Guy Maddin (The Saddest Music in the World)
Independent Cinema
D. K. Holm
D. K. Holm aims to define a term all too carelessly used both by media commentators and marketers, and distinguish it from categories such as avant–garde, underground, experimental or 'art' films, with which it is often confused.
By contrasting studio–era Hollywood with changes in the business since the 1970s, and the rise of companies such as Miramax and New Line, it shows the birth of a commercial environment in which the new independent cinema can emerge.
Profiles of specific filmmakers such as Guy Maddin, Jill Sprecher and James Mangold suggest how diverse personalities use independent cinema for individual ends.
978–1–904048–70–1
This ebook edition first published in 2011
First published in 2011
by Kamera Books
an imprint of Oldcastle Books
P O Box 394,
Harpenden, AL5 1XJ
www.kamerabooks.com
All rights reserved
© Lucy Scher
The right of Lucy Scher to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
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ISBN
978-1-84243-510-6 Print
978-1-84243-511-3 Kindle
978-1-84243-512-0 Epub
978-1-84243-513-7 PDF
For further information please visit:
http://www.kamerabooks.com/readingscreenplays
