Intro to Script Writing

1 or 3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

Intro to Script Writing serves as the first rung in a three-course ladder designed to introduce students to the fundamentals of writing for the large (film), rather than the small (television), screen. It is a prerequisite for Intermediate and Advanced Script Writing, the middle and final stages. The course starts from the Aristotelian precept that plot is character in action. But it also insists on the primacy for film of the image and of montage. From the beginning students are encouraged to see how the camera invariable lies, and how the frame functions at the same time to display and to conceal, to reveal and to mislead. To illustrate this complexity, during the term the course reviews a broad selection of the major films of Alfred Hitchcock, the master of classic American film syntax. Those films are supplemented by a smaller number of others from the Studio Sound Era, 1935–1985. The films are screened for the class on Sunday afternoons; all screenings are mandatory. Interested students are advised to approach ENGL-284 primarily as a writing course, and only secondarily as a film course. They can expect to write regularly, at least once and sometimes twice a week, responding to specific, craft-oriented prompts that cover incrementally an increasingly complex menu of script techniques and topics.