London Film School, offer full-time MA Degree courses in both Film Making and Screewriting.

A weekend course designed to give screenwriters and directors simple and effective tools with which to create new work and fix problems in existing work through improvisation.

Course Outline

Improvisation is often seen as a comedic, sketch-based performance style. However, it is also used successfully to enable writers to write “on their feet” and as a powerful tool for improving many elements from dialogue within scenes to overall story structure.

The course will be fundamentally practical in nature. Although there will be reflection and discussion time at the end, the majority of the course will be spent improvising characters and scenes under the direction of a highly experienced teacher and performer. Participants will discover new methods for devising characters and scenes and will develop storylines using fundamental principals of narrative storytelling. This will allow them to be dramatists who can see the scenes as they are being performed, from the point of view of the actor as well as the audience.

The following key issues will be addressed

How to:

• Apply the fundamental principals of narrative story-telling to the craft of dramatic writing.
• Use improvisation to put scenes on their feet, and save hours drafting and redrafting at your word-processor.
• Find active, dramatic ways to deal with exposition.
• Make “boring” scenes “engaging”.
• Make passive protagonists active.
• Create complex characters.
• Create dynamic relationships between characters.
• Raise the stakes.
• Increase tension and suspense.
• Explore principals of dramatic irony, reversal, recognition and re-incorporation.
• Create stories that have strong, clear structure and shape.

The course is not dogmatic and does not provide a “gospel” concerning storytelling. Instead it offers clear, practical tools for creating effective, dramatic and engaging screenplays.

At the end of the course you will have a set of skills to use when working on any aspect of the screenwriting process, from rough first outline to polished redraft.

This course will also help directors and writers find the most effective language and approaches to use when directing actors.

Fee:£150

Maximum Participants: 10

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Instructions

Please complete the Application Form and the Ethnicity and Disability monitoring form and email them to : Carolyn Atherton:
workshops@lfs.org.uk

Resources

• Application Form
• Ethnicity and Disability monitoring form

email or post them together with the following:

• Personal Statement
• CV

Postal Address:
Workshops Admissions, The London Film School, 24 Shelton Street, London, WC2H 9UB, UK

Email:
Carolyn Atherton: workshops@lfs.org.uk

Telephone us:
+44 (0)20 7836 9642

Fax us:
+44 (0)20 7497 3718

• Workshop Tutor Profile

Funding

Skillset Screen Bursaries allow freelancers and employees in the UK’s film and TV industries to train for less. Visit: www.skillset.org/film/
funding/bursaries for details and contact Laura Fox directly for elegibility criteria Lauraf@skillset.org