The Three Act Structure
This article will focus on the format that’s most commonly seen in contemporary movies, the causal, character-driven “Three Act Structure”. While modern films don’t have intervals or ‘real’ acts, the …
Course: An Introduction to Screenwriting
Panel thoughts on story and form
Our four educators share what they’re looking for in a cinematic story. They share their experiences about writing for a cinematic form and soon discover that not everyone approaches their …
What do we mean by cinematic story and form?
Michael Lengsfield starts by taking a broad look at screen stories. Anyone who’s been to the pictures will have a perfectly good notion of how screen stories operate. For example, …
An introduction to Week 1
Michael Lengsfield, Lead Educator, welcomes you and introduces the course. In the first week, we’ll take a broad look at story and what makes a screen story, developing our own …
Perspectives on creating the scene
What is our process for creating a scene? In this discussion each educator shares his or her process for creating a scene.
Expanding the Five Finger Pitch
In this second week, let’s continue to work with the story we developed for our Five Finger Pitch, which should loosely conform to the model for the character-driven three act …
Stories that don’t fit the Three Act mould
The panel discusses a range of alternate story structures and considers structure in relation to story architecture, audience expectations, the immersive medium and interrupted narratives. It’s over to you: see …
Alternate story structures
In the last discussion of story structure, we looked at the dominant form in theatrical films, the character-based causal Three Act Structure. Now we’ll look at other approaches to story …
Panel thoughts on the Three Act Structure
Our educators review together the purpose of each act in the common Three Act Structure, the dominant form of story telling for film. It’s over to you: see if you …
What is story structure?
What is a story structure? It refers to the process of organising the story and constructing the screenplay’s plot. Story structure is concerned with the order and timing of the …
The Five Finger Pitch: an explanation
Michael Lengsfield describes his Five Finger Pitch technique and suggests it as one way to quickly summarise your story. The aim is to find a story shape you can confidently …
Developing a basic storyline
When developing a story, we all need time to cast about for the material that interests and excites us. At a certain point, however, it helps to work some ideas …
Meet the team
This step gives you the opportunity to find out a little more about the team that will be guiding you through this course. It might be a good idea to …
Welcome aboard!
Giles Foden, author of The Last King of Scotland welcomes you to An Introduction to Screenwriting. As a professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, Giles introduces …
How to format a screenplay
Screenplay Form and Style It helps to use professional scripts as a guide, so read lots of scripts. The BBC Writers Room offers a wide selection of sample scripts. Check …