Screenwriting

Official Description: This course introduces students to the basics of screenwriting and provides them with the opportunity to develop their storytelling craft. Through attention to the elements of the screenwriting craft and a range of prompts, students learn to harness their abilities as visual storytellers. Students will practice drawing on their memories, experiences, observation and, of course, imagination to create compelling characters and stories for the screen. Selected screenplays and scripts will be read and discussed during the course and the completed productions will be viewed to develop an understanding of how the script and serves as the blueprint for the finished project. Assignments will follow prompts to create, for instance, formatted scenes (both comedic and dramatic, and everything in between), show conflict and connection through dialogue and in the visual language of cinema, and create compelling characters in “real” settings (even if those settings are out of this world). Students work toward creating and revising a full act of an original feature-length screenplay (roughly 25-30 revised pages), as well as articulating the film’s entire arc and major plot points of the second and third acts of the script