First week back and we’re straight into business. Quite literally, actually.
This first two classes of this studio were screenwriting workshops with Australian Film & TV Director/Screenwriter, Ana Kokkinos. This is was definitely an eye opener for me and I’m so glad that it happened so early on in the semester because what she shared with us were definitely invaluable knowledge about a certain aspect of production, that is, the script. Regardless of whether you’re a Screenwriting or Media student, knowing how to read a script is important.
She went through the basics of what makes a good script and what doesn’t. As she was going through these characteristics, it made me see how important structure was to screenwriting and it reminded of the first times I’ve written scripts for short videos way back in high school. And at the same time, it made me question my abilities in writing because although I may not be that great of a creative writer, I would like to make an attempt at writing a screenplay.
Everything that she shared with us about screenwriting was definitely vital for anyone in production. And beyond the structure, she also went through the narrative aspect of a script and I found it interesting how an action being described can be seen as a choreography of the scene. I’ve never really thought of reading character actions as choreography, but when you think about it, this notion makes sense because choreography is basically ‘a sequence of steps and movements’ and a script describing how an character/actor is suppose to move is giving them choreography.
We were also given an adaptation task where the Screenwriting and Media students collaborated in adapting a short story. The Screenwriters had to write a script that had a maximum of three pages adapting the short story into either a reconstruction (remaining as faithful to the source); a re-imagination (remaining faithful to the spirit of the source, but not externally); or a deconstruction. And in turn, the Media students had to create a mood board based on the scripts that they are given.
As a Media student, the mood boards I collated were any visual references I thought were of inspiration to me when reading my given script. In my case, and I guess for most of us doing mood boards, we based our visual references on our own individual thoughts without first discussing it with the writer. I think that in doing this, it gave us Media students an opportunity to make our own visual adaptations. I was glad that when I discussed my mood board with the writer after I made it, we were surprisingly on the same page for the most part since I collated images on a play-by-play basis. But if I were to do it again, I would definitely discuss the script with the writer first to really get a sense of how they envision their writing to be reflected on screen and it would ensure that we would be on the same page from the beginning instead of meeting halfway.