Writing Cinematically: The Construction of Brilliant Cinema

17 December 2008

With Duncan Thompson

Short Courses

UPDATE: This seminar is now fully booked.

A free one day seminar presented by the Australian Writers’ Guild in association with the International Film School Sydney.

Writing a great movie, writing a scintillating and compelling experience, involves a specific understanding of the screenwriter’s art and craft.

Cinema is unlike any other medium in the way it engages its audience in emotionally meaningful moments and thematically meaningful actions and events. All good films, all good movies, do this. There is a tangible sense of engagement with the interior world of living, breathing characters. A sense of palpable subjectivities. All good stories, all good dramas or comedies, do this. A connection with the heart and soul and mind. A tangible experience of thinking and feeling what the characters are thinking and feeling. In cinema we don’t watch, we see. Seeing is knowing. “If you see what I mean.” And all of this is given shape, and meaning. A sense of entertainment, edification, exhilaration. It elevates and enlightens us. Great films have a resonance beyond the here and now. Writing cinema (or rather constructing cinema) is a specific moment-to-moment art and skill practiced by the screenwriter, the director, the picture editor, the cast and crew, if written and staged and built correctly with an understanding of the overall creation of meaning.

If this all sounds like impenetrable abstract theory, then this is the seminar to make it simple, to make it how you write. Nuts and bolts. Practicable. Easy. This inspiring, entertaining, eye-opening lecture takes place over one day and teaches you the secrets of constructing engaging, exciting explosive cinema.

Topics covered include: the drama of being human, dramatic legibility of character, subjectivity, the cinematic brilliance of the central passive character, writing moments, the phenomenological structure of character subjectivities, thematic expression through dramatic engineering, writing great cinematic endings, creating compelling character and audience journeys, writing inspired dialogue, creating the brilliant scene.