THE STORY STRUCTURE OF MOTION PICTURES

Showings

Cinema Arts Centre - Cinema 1 Sat, Jan 16, 2016 10:00 AM
Sky Room Café Sat, Apr 22, 2017 10:00 AM

Description

WORKSHOP 8 Saturdays: April 22 – June 10 | 10 am-12 pm | $195 (8 Classes)


THE STORY STRUCTURE OF MOTION PICTURES

Cinema Arts Centre proudly presents the return of its popular screenwriting seminar. Whether you want to be a screenwriter or are just looking for a better understanding of how movies work, Stephen Martin Siegel’s acclaimed workshop on cinematic story structure is wonderfully illuminating.

If you’ve ever had an idea for a movie but didn’t know how to develop it into a screenplay, or if you just love movies and want to know more about them, then this course is for you. Designed for beginners, it explores the techniques involved in writing and/or understanding movies. For instance, did you know that virtually all good movies have a carefully defined structure? They follow a three-act model called the “paradigm,” which is the backbone of good storytelling and is present in almost every movie you see. It takes only a few hours to learn the paradigm but many weeks to master it. Through movie screenings, screenplay readings and discussions, this course will teach students to recognize and understand restorative, three-act motion picture structure through the paradigm. The class will examine motion pictures from a writer’s perspective. Unlike most film studies courses, it will not concentrate upon historical or sociological perspectives; rather, it will focus upon the construction of the film story. The screenings and discussions will deal exclusively with narrative motion pictures rather than abstract or experimental films. The course will also explore the realities of the film industry: how and why certain movies get made; how to find an agent and break in as a screenwriter; dealing with producers; legally protecting your work; union affiliations and many other facets of movie-making.

Stephen Martin Siegel is an award-winning screenwriter who resides on Long Island. He taught film & television writing for ten years at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where he earned an M.F.A. in Dramatic Writing. He has worked under contract to Touchstone Pictures, a division of Walt Disney Pictures, and has written screenplays for such diverse names as Sean Connery, Dawn Steel and Dick Clark. He is a Lifetime Member of the Writer’s Guild of America, and many of his students have enjoyed success in the film and television industries including Jonathan Liebesman, who directed the recent reboot of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; Robert Ben Garant & Thomas Lennon, writers of Night at the Museum and Reno! 911; and Susan DeMasi, who won the Tony Cox Award for Screenwriting at the Nantucket Film Festival.