2.Main Content
Training
Story Design
A brand new two-day screenwriting workshop aimed to help you work an idea for a film into a solid screen story.
Tuesday 28th & Wednesday 29th September
10am-5pm
Soho Theatre, Studio
Storytelling is a talent. However, skilful film storytelling requires more than just natural creativity: screenwriters need to learn how to shape a story into one that can be told over 90 odd minutes, keep an audience rooted to the screen for the duration and ensure that everyone is emotionally engaged with the plight of the characters as the story unfolds.
Taught by Lucy Scher and Rob Ritchie, this new 2-day workshop considers the essential elements of designing a story for the screen. Whether you’re working at the idea stage or you’re in the process of redrafting, this programme aims to help you ensure that your idea is achieving its fullest potential. Will your story speak to the widest possible audience? Are you using the best cinematic devices to hook the audience in? Have you created a compelling and intriguing story world? Are the characters that populate your story the best ones to serve the idea?
The Programme
Day One
10 – 11.15 Defining the Universal Conflict
Screenplays are about specific characters in a specific situation. The films with the most enduring appeal, however, are those that allow the audience to recognise the characters problems and predicaments and relate them to their own experience. This opening session explores how to find the universal conflict in a dramatic idea so the audience is personally engaged in what’s at stake.
11.15 – 11.30 Break
11.30 – 1.00 Framing the Story: Beginnings and Endings
An audience needs to know why they are watching a film and to leave the cinema satisfied that there was a purpose to the story being told. What is it they are supposed to care about? What ending will the story and the audience demand? This session illustrates how to open your story with a clear dramatic question and create an ending that has real impact and meaning.
1.00 – 2.00 Break
Recognisable hooks: Let The Right One In2.00 – 3.30 Cinematic Hooks
Continuing the theme of how to begin your screenplay, this session explores how to give ideas for dramas the big screen treatment by using recognisable hooks from cinematic genres. The session also illustrates how to create external drama to reveal the most intimate internal character journey.
3.30 – 3.45 Break
3.45 – 5.00 Locations and Story Worlds
In some films the setting of the story is a character in its own right, in others the location is merely a backdrop. 
On location - Up In The AirWhether it’s the domestic interiors of melodrama or the epic landscapes of action-adventure, the mise-en-scene is the source of the images and metaphors that give the story its meaning. This session examines how choosing the right locations can both clarify the meaning and liberate the cinematic potential of a story.
Day Two
10.00 – 11.15 What do you want from me?: Matching Characters and Story Types
The way an audience relates to character depends on the kind of story being told. Everyone loves an underdog, but not necessarily in an action adventure film. The heroines of romantic comedies may not believe that they are worthy of true love but the audience certainly needs to think that they are. This session aims to dispel some myths about what makes a ‘good screen character’ and considers how to make certain your protagonist has the right attributes for their role.
11.15 – 11.30 Break
11.30 – 1.00 And what do you do exactly? : Secondary Characters.
Story design naturally concentrates on the fortunes of the protagonist – the character the story is all about. But how do the secondary characters – the hero’s allies and adversaries - fit into the overall design? This session looks at how identifying the dramatic arc of each character in a screenplay can help to solve problems of plot and structure.
1.00 – 2.00 Break
2.00 – 3.30 Building a Sequence
Screenplays are routinely discussed in terms of Acts and Scenes. While this allows the main beats of the story to be analysed it obscures the fact that movies are composed of sequences. This session explores story design by illustrating how a sequence is built and addresses the question: how many sequences does it take to make a screenplay?
3.30–3.45 Break
3.45–5.00 Story Re-design
This final session aims to leave you equipped to approach your story idea with fresh eyes and offers some useful tools for the continuing development of your screenplay.
Friendly Producers
Writers who complete this course will also be invited to apply to our Friendly Producer's scheme. Applicants will have approximately one month to submit a 2 page treatment and the first ten pages of a screenplay. We will then select a writer from the programme who will benefit from the chance to discuss their film idea at a one-to-one meeting with the award-winning Brit producer, Mia Bays.
Booking Information
The fee for Story Design is £195 + VAT (total £229.13) which includes light refreshments and a comprehensive training pack.
Script Factory Members can get a 10% discount reducing the total to £175.50 + VAT (total £206.21) - for details of Membership click here.
Required Viewing: Lars And The Real GirlThe workshop will be taught as informal lectures and spaces are strictly limited to 30 participants. To book your place by credit / debit card, please call 0207 851 4890.
Preparatory Viewing
We will be referring to a wide range of films over the two-day course, some of which you will inevitably be more familiar with than others. To ensure that we have shared references to consider in more detail we would ask all course attendees to watch the following recent films:
Shifty (dir/sc. Eran Creevy, 2008)
Lars & The Real Girl (sc. Nancy Oliver, dir. Craig Gillespie, 2008)
Let The Right One In (sc. John Ajvide Lindqvist, dir Tomas Alfredson, 2009)