Scene writing for Film and TV
Event details
Scenes are the component parts that make up the engine of a dramatic story and drive it forward. Memorable scenes stay with us forever, defining our response to a particular film or TV drama: that scene when … that moment when ... Mediocre scenes can confuse and disengage, undermining the story and its meaning. A better understanding of scenes and how they work results in better written scenes and scripts. This presentation will explore how effective teaching of scene-writing, and how writers at all levels can approach this, has a tangible effect on improving the standard of a script of any length, genre or type and the impact it can make. Clearer scenes, with well-defined dramatic tensions and active dramatic questions, can also aid readers, directors and actors to understand better the contextual and sub-textual motivations intended by the writer through the behaviour of their characters, the individual status of these characters in a scene, and the strategies they adopt to get what they want, resulting in more involving and engaging performances on screen.
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Meeting ID: 970 4197 3598
Passcode: 627701
About the speaker
Simon Van Der Borgh (University of York)
I have worked in theatre, film and television since 1984 as a director, writer and teacher. The ideas in this talk have formed a key part of my ongoing practice-based scholarship and research inside and outside the classroom since I was appointed as the Lecturer in Screenwriting at York in 2012 and are drawn from my forthcoming book Scene-writing for Film and TV (Routledge, 2024).