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| English 303: Screenwriting, Spring 2018 |
English 303: Screenwriting Workshop was an interesting and fun experience. As an Integrated Language Arts Education major, and having taught creative writing in a middle school last spring, I was curious to see how this class would go. Having only taught poetry and short story writing, I was not aware of the screenwriting genre; in fact I never read a screenplay before this class. There were several ILA majors in the class, and I think we were all a bit nervous since we never saw a screenplay, let alone wrote one.
Dr. Grady began the class by walking us through how to format a screenplay and the different movie genres, to familiarize us with the forms in which we could write. After going through the action-adventure and thriller genres I knew that I wanted to write an action-adventure-thriller film.
After deciding on a genre, I knew that I wanted to do something James Bond-esque, but instead of a single agent, have a team, a CIA agent and an MI6 agent. I also wanted a strong female character in an action movie that also focused on character development.
We had to write as close to a full-length movie as possible. I ended up binge writing my movie throughout the semester and ended with a 93-page script, titled Retribution Informant. The class workshopped our scripts all throughout the semester in class and in small group workshops.
In the middle of the semester we had a guest speaker, screenwriter and film director, Robby Henson. Robby Henson talked to our class about the rewards and struggles of screenwriting and directing, showed us clips about his new documentary I Come From, and showed clips from the other film projects he wrote and directed.
For our final, we had to give a movie pitch, a two to three-minute talk about what are movie is about, how it is new/fresh, and what the intended audience is. We had a guest professor, Robert Sean Parker, an AU theater faculty member and actor. Professor Parker listened to our pitches and Dr. Grady and Professor Parker gave each of us feedback.
This class gave me a new insight on a different mode of creative writing. I had so much fun writing and discussing our own movie scripts. I decided that if I end of teaching creative writing at a high school I want to add either a screenwriting unit or a screenwriting/film class to the ELA curriculum.
