Screenwriting I: 10 Week Workshop (Online)

Screenwriting I is a 10-week workshop, which includes lectures, exercises, and the critiquing of student projects. It’s for beginners or anyone who wants to brush up on the fundamentals. Farther down, you can view a syllabus for this course.

Movies are the modern mythology—the stories we all watch for excitement, inspiration, and entertainment. So many genres and types...drama, comedy, action/adventure, science fiction, fantasy, thriller, horror, crime, noir, epic, western, war, romantic comedy, musical. Larger than life blockbusters or down-to-earth depictions of reality. Tales told with emotional verve and visual imagery we never forget.

A movie isn’t great unless it starts with a great blueprint—the screenplay. Here you’ll learn how to write for the movies and how to market your work.

Whether you seek to write shorts or features, Hollywood glamor or indie grit, we’ll show you how to write screenplays that light up the screen.

This course gives you a firm grounding in the basics of screenwriting craft and gets you writing a screenplay.

Course components:

• Lectures
• Writing exercises
• Workshopping of student projects (each student presenting work two times)

Course Syllabus:

Online classes 

• Week 1
• Introduction to Screenwriting: The visual nature of movies. Screenplays as blueprints. Where to find ideas. Forming a premise. High and low concept. Hollywood vs. indie. Genre. The usefulness of outlines.
• Week 2
• Plot I: Finding a major dramatic question. The three-act structure. The difference between classic plots and subtle plots. Making a story map.
• Week 3
• Character: Finding a strong protagonist. Handling other characters. Making characters dimensional through desire and contrasts. Creating character profiles. Showing characters through their actions.
• Week 4
• Format/Description: How to format a screenplay. Writing effective screenplay description.
• Week 5
• Scene: Scene defined. Length of scene. Tenets of a good scenes—importance, desire/conflict, structure, compression, visual storytelling. Sequences. Making a step outline.
• Week 6
• Dialogue: Dialogue’s illusion of reality. Compression. Characterization through dialogue. Subtext. Exposition. Stage directions. Voice over.
• Week 7
• Subplot: The value of subplots. Romantic subplots. Other kinds of subplots for the protagonist. Non-protagonist subplots. Subplot structure. Finding subplots in your story.
• Week 8
• Plot II: Creating an effective opening section. Techniques for sustaining Act II. Creating an effective climax. Flashbacks.
• Week 9
• Tone/Theme/Revision: Developing tone through genre, world, and lightness/darkness. Consistency of tone. Theme defined. Types of theme. Weaving theme into a story. Exploration of the various stages of revision.
• Week 10
• The Business: Creating pitches. Studios, producers, and representation. How to get your pitch to players in the industry. Query letters. The life of a screenwriter.

Note: Content may vary among individual classes.

About

• The Online classes bring students from all over the globe to Gotham—New York City’s most famous writing school.
• The Online classes happen asynchronously—not in “real time.” You can participate in class any time, day or night, but the classes advance week-by-week, and certain things should be accomplished within that week-long session.
• You can take an Online writing class from anywhere, as long as you have an internet connection. The majority of our Online students are located in the U.S. but we also draw students from practically every country in the world.
• Tech support will be available.
• Aside from the convenience of time and location, you have a record of everything that transpires in class, which you can print out and keep for future reference. (The material is text and image, not video.)