Intro to Screenwriting

Exercise 1a. List the external role or job of your Protagonist. How does he or she fulfill that role, meaning the inner personality fact that drives the character as he / she copes with the events. Carefully choose your qualifiers for edginess, qualities that can either be positive or negative, qualities that will be used and honed throughout the story.

Dramatic Stage Play or Screenplay has . . .
1. Reliance on visual images & directions for collaborators to interpret
2. Linear story with direct thrust, minimal subplot support
3. Minimal action-oriented narrative text due to reliance on visual
a) Stage Play 65% dialogue-35% action directives
b) Screenplay 35% dialogue-65% action narrative
4. A “group effort” collaboration of director / actors / staging
5. Heightened immediacy for audience experience
6. 90-120 Pages (100 pages average on Spec Script)

Concept:Each page of script = One Minute Screen / Play Time

1. Direct line of action, no digressions
2. One Focus, one pivotal event in Protagonist’s complicated life
3. Sense of immediacy, what the Protagonist wants now
4. Heightened conflict / disruption & severe threat

Novel has . . .
1. Complex story in obviously long format
2. Time to develop many characters, relationships, events
3. Time to depict many facets of Protagonist & Major Antagonist
4. Time to weave subplots toward culmination of ending

Short Story has . . .

Ask yourself why this story and why are you passionate about writing it? Not who is your target audience, but what sets you on fire to tell this story. That is the kind of thing a producer would ask in a pitch session. That is the reason you define your attitude and commit to your passion at inception.

SMOKE SIGNALS is so very different from the period story of THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS. That’s why the surrealism of THE MATRIX is so different from WHAT DREAMS MAY COME.

Example: A callous Southern playboy inherits a whore house filled with orphan children and an irate madam. (16 words)
a / role = Southern playboy
b / trait = callous
c / situation = inherits whore house
d / ironic complication = filled with orphan children and an irate madam.

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