STORYTELLING: Introduction to Screenwriting (Lecture)

The afternoon session consisted of meeting and listening to Steve Coombes who has been a screenwriter for 27 years. He was funny and interesting which made us want to listen rather than having to listen to him. He told us what a longline, treatment and bible is in television terms. 

Screenplays and Structure
This was the first subject he chose to teach us about. If the screenplay isn't working then the structure isn't right; I found this to be very helpful advice and it was short and sweet so I will remember it. It was really lovely meeting Steve as he is also the person who will be assessing our scripts at the end of the story-telling unit, so it was good to see what he was like and what he likes in a script. 

He also taught us the 5 golden rules about structure of screenplay (however, these can be broken if needed):

1. Intelligence Principal.
Only tell the audience what they need to know, not what we might think is good or funny. Also that the first thing they need to know is that there is an ending/that the story is going somewhere. 

2. SHOW don't Tell.
Remembering the quote - Seeing is believing
Show a character being angry etc. don't tell/say it.

3. Screenplay is like a joke.
Every scene is thought to have a 'set up, distraction and punchline'. 

4. Know the ending.
The story is not going to work without a destination (like a sat nav).

5. Moments.
Your story needs 'moments' so people can finish and say "remember that?!"

His last bit of advice for todays session was to make sure our actors bring magic to the screen. So choose as best actors as we can for our 2 minute films and trailers.

The last part of the session we looked at two different types of script of the same film. One was the correct, final draft and the other was the wrong, first draft. I thought the right script was the draft with more information on it as it told you everything what was happening throughout the story. It was also set out more professionally, however, for the actors I did think it would be slightly confusing as I wasn't even sure what part the dialogue was. When we spoke to Steve he told us that it depends who the script is going to, if it was a producer or editor then the first one with the most information on would be the correct script but if it was the actor then the second one with less information on is correct. Overall, the better script was the one with less information as it tells the story straight in rather than dragging it out, it told the set up in one page rather than five pages like the other. This was really useful as I had no idea what scripts look like and our scripts need to be set out as professional ones so this helped with that.