Let’s See What You Got

It’s Week 8 and I finally have a story that I like – and it has actually stuck with me. For the past few weeks, I have come up with short stories and individual scenes here and there from the writing exercises we’ve had in class and some I’ve written in my own time. But […]

Good Talk

It was better than good, it was a great talk. For our one and only class this week, we had a guest lecture with screenwriter, Catherine McMullen. (NB: This blog post may be super vague when discussing certain topics due to privacy reasons.) She was able to provide us with one of her works which […]

So I Have Some Bad News

Not literally. Just fictionally. This week, we had yet another writing exercise which was linked to the screenplay analysis we did. Our task was to write a scene – with no dialogue – where Character A learns that (offscreen) Character B has been killed in an accident. Here is what I came up with: INT. […]

From Another World

Actually, it was just from another country. But anyway, we started the week by reading scripts written by people from another country. To sum up the script that I got, it’s a story about a busker who changes his performance into something other to compete with another street performer, and they get into a physical […]

We Need To Talk

To say that this class was like any other would just be a lie. We started the class with a speed dating exercise. No, we weren’t actually speed dating, but more like speed presenting our ideas (or rather lack thereof for me). To be completely honest, at the beginning of the class (and even the […]

Are You Write?

Nearing the mid-point of the semester, we started the week with a really interesting writing exercise. Taken from The Creative Screenwriter: Exercises to Expand Your Craft, we we’re given a random word, then we had to write 15 words related to that word, pick a word from that list, then write 10 new words related […]

Up, Up & Away

This week, we also came back to the montage of Elle and Carl’s relationship from the animated film, Up (2009). But this time, we were given the task of writing one part of this sequence into scene text. I decided to do the first 20 seconds were they have just been married and this is […]

Do You Get It?

So this week, we focused our attention to a chapter from Written for the Screen (Sternberg, 1997), and discussed any revelations and confusions we had from this reading. From all the knowledge we’d been absorbing for the past few weeks, the only thing that confused me with this reading was how camera cues were acceptable […]

Once Upon A Time

A new day, a new task. Instead of focusing on both audio and visual storytelling, we began the lesson by focusing on visual storytelling. We had to create a story through a series of photos, using between 5-9 images. My group and I ventured out of the university and centred our story on a crime […]

What Do You See?

It’s week four and we were back to the short French film, I’ll Catch The Next One. We also looked back on all the knowledge we have gained so far in regards to screenwriting and the techniques, structure, etc. that make a good screenplay. And for today’s lesson, we had a chance to apply that […]