Screenwriting 1: The Outline

Description

If you’ve got some great ideas for movies and you want to get them down on paper, take this 6-week course.   This class will give you the motivation and support you need to successfully outline any story you’ve been dreaming of bringing to the big screen!  You’ll go from an initial idea or logline all the way to a complete step outline.  A step outline is a writer’s tool that lays out your whole story in short form, allowing you to pitch the film verbally to friends, investors or movie studio executives.

In this course you will develop:

• a firm grasp of story concepts like: inciting incident, midpoint, and climax
• an ability to analyze your favorite films and what makes the story work
• the skill of making your script a cohesive whole by using theme and cognitive effect
• learn what reversals are and how they need to be in every scene you include in your script

Here is how the six week course will proceed.  There are six classes of 2 hours each.

Week 1: The Logline and Analysis of Hit Films.  We’ve all seen films we love, now we want to understand what those screenwriter’s did to make us love those films.  When we have a grasp of what cognitive effects are, we will develop a logline for a project we will work on for the whole course.

Week 2: Notecards and Reversal.  Now that we have a strong story idea, we will create an avalanche of scenes that will appear in our feature film.  We will make sure to include drama in every scene to merit its inclusion in the final script.

Week 3: How to Be Prolific Now So You Can Edit Later.  We will expand our story world and make side notes about the theme, the symbols used, and create character dossiers that will inform every scene once we eventually write the full script.  These side documents are very important for fleshing out the step outline as a verbal pitch.

Week 4: Using Theme and Cognitive Effect to Edit.  Now that we have a massive amount of writing completed, we can go through and organize our notecards and update them to reflect the story in its current form.

Week 5: Master the Key Story Beats.  We now solidy and enhance the key story beats: inciting incident, first reversal, midpoint, second reversal, crisis, climax, and resolution.

Week 6: Polishing and Pitching Verbally.  Our work on the page is done, now we want to tell our story to other people and see how they react.  We’ll practice our 10-minute verbal pitch.

DATES/TIMES

Class Starts 4/19/23–Wednesdays 6-8pm PT

4/19

4/26

5/3

5/10

5/17

5/24

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR:
Hi, Sean A. Mulvihill. I’ve been teaching screenwriting and filmmaking since 2013. I’ve produced two independent feature films, Act Social, which won an award at the Manhattan Film Festival in 2021, and Living Luminaries, which has been seen by millions of viewers since its release by the Spiritual Cinema Circle, Beyond Words, and Amazon Prime.

You can see some of my work at seanamulvihill.com.

I’m a positive and motivating person and my teaching style is honest, practical, and fun. I look forward to helping you reach your goals!

Good-Fit Guarantee: We want you to love the class and find it worth every penny! If you don’t think the class is right for you after your first session, let us know before the second session and we’ll give you a refund. Email info@exubs.com or call 917-907-2537. No refunds after second session starts.

Class Size: Limit of 16.

Cost: $225