Ideas for Successful Scriptwriting Short Course
Course description
Course overview
No story or screenplay is entirely original. Every story echoes others that came before it. Over 14 steps, this unique and innovative course offers techniques and skills to connect your writing with successful themes and ideas.
Through a sequence of carefully calibrated steps, this unique and innovative course offers techniques and skills to connect your writing with meaningful themes and ideas. You'll be offered a secure method of developing your own templates for storytelling to convey ideas with powerful conviction. The depth and richness of your work will be achieved through thematic understanding of every nuance and detail in story and character.
We'll provide clear and practical strategies, including critical analysis of films and devising creative writing templates that ensure your ideas are developed to their full potential. We will also embrace and utilise other art-forms to stimulate and develop unified concepts. You'll leave the course with at least one well developed story that may be taken into production.
The course methodology is a distillation of over 10 years scriptwriting with under and post-graduate students at Goldsmiths University of London.
Who this course is for
As most creative careers involve storytelling this is very much an upskilling course. It is suitable for writing, advertising, film, TV, painting, and photography. Good English is required but previous experience in scriptwriting isn't necessary.
Key information
Topics covered
- A greater awareness of archetypes and character transformation in storytelling and film
- Experience of shared authorship and ideas development
- An appreciation of both theoretical and intuitive analysis of storytelling and film
Learning outcomes
- An ability to produce work that corresponds with the greater canon of storytelling and film
- Greater confidence as a storyteller and writer.
- Digital badge and certificate of attendance
Materials
- Pen and paper or a laptop/iPad
- Students are encouraged to bring in a film, book, poem, painting, photograph - anything that might be a starting point for your story. The course is very open to all art forms
- The DeepRiver website can be a useful learning resource
Tutor
Mark Aitken
Mark Aitken is an award-winning documentary practitioner of film, photography, radio, written and spoken word, sound, animation and installation. He's currently completing mixed-media works in Lapland about loss, memory and transformative renewal.
Key past works include 'Neighbourhood of Infinity' about confinement and freedom, the multi-award winning 'Dead when I got here' about a Mexican psychiatric hospital run by its own patients; 'Forest of Crocodiles' about a fearful white South African rural community; 'Until when you die' tracing a Vietnamese refugee's journey home and 'This was Forever' about the loss of a community allotment in London. His photo series 'Sanctum Ephemeral' won the UK National Open Art 2017 and Portrait of Britain 2017 and is permanently installed on-site in London.
Mark was a Kone Arts Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium of Advanced Studies and taught film practice at Goldsmiths for 11 years. He ran a non-profit company that produced over 40 films. Mark holds a PhD by Publication entitled 'Emotional truths in documentary making' from Goldsmiths.
For more information about Mark Aitken's education and work, please visit www.markaitken.org and https://polkadotsonraindrops.jimdofree.com
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