Film Course

Once every year, we open a film course, only for professionals.

This is the Syllabus

 

The duration of the course is 6 weeks, one four-hour session a week

How to sign up for the film course for writers and directors … Check our website often. We will announce it here.

Excerpt of the Course

 

INTRODUCTION

The eternal present.
Visualization.
Cinematographic Language vs. Literary Language.
The structure of a short film: beginning, development, and sudden upturn of the situation.
The twist. The message.

THE NEVER-ENDING PRESENT

Why do we speak of a never-ending present?

Cinema is a continuous succession of events. A permanent flow in front of our eyes. What we see is happening in a continuous succession of here’s and now’s. Cinema is a continuum. Even that which refers to the memories of the character (flash backs), her fantasies, her dreams (flash forward) is, for us who are watching, a continuous succession of here’s and now’s. Something happens on the screen, in images, and we, as screenplay writers, are supposed to put this “happening” down onto paper.

How are we supposed to do this?

They say, “All roads lead to Rome.”  You can leave Venice and walk west, cross France, the Iberian Peninsula, the Atlantic, continue on your way across America, the Pacific, etc. Eventually you will reach Rome. That is, in a manner of speaking, what screenplay authors have been doing, along different routes, for 100 years of Cinema history: writing the so-called “literary screenplays” with a theatre structure. Indeed, they have “reached Rome”; a useable screenplay, after as many as ten or more re-writes.

As a consequence, once the film is produced, authors have cried to heaven: “This is not what I wrote! The director did not understand, he missed the point, he distorted the story, I would like to strangle him in the name of justice for writers, everywhere!”