About the Course
Great screenwriting is built on deep human emotion and radical collaboration. This intensive workshop is designed for writers who want to weaponize feeling, master high-concept storytelling, and find the raw seeds of a brilliant narrative. In this course, you will not just study theory—you will actively write your own complete screenplay and step into the shoes of a working industry professional by critically reviewing the stories of your peers.
Cinema is a collaborative medium, and this program treats the classroom like a real-world writers' room. You will learn how to discover the emotional heart of an idea, push through the grueling process of drafting and rewriting, and collaborate deeply with other creatives. By teaching you how to unearth the core mechanics of your own scripts and elevate the work of your fellow writers, this course gives you the vital structural and community tools needed to bring powerful, authentic stories to life.
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What You Will Learn vs. What You Will Do
What You Will Learn
The Emotional Seed: How to mine your deep personal opinions, core philosophies, and heavy life experiences to uncover the raw seeds of a brilliant, high-concept narrative.
* The Power of Care: Why a character does not need to be "likable" to hook an audience, and how to weaponize a character’s absolute passion and extreme desperation to drive a plot forward.
* Single-Problem Engine: How to construct a tightly wound script where a single, devastating core conflict naturally cascades into a full three-act structure.
* Thematic Dialectics: The craft of building layered, complex themes by pitting two equally powerful, flawed moral arguments against each other.
* Professional Story Analysis: How to read a script like a working development executive, pinpointing exactly where a story loses its emotional engine and how to fix it.
* Radical Collaboration: The mechanics of working within a professional writers' room, including how to give constructive, non-destructive feedback and how to process critique of your own work.
What You Will Do
Pitch an Emotional Premise: Formulate and pitch a highly imaginative, structurally sound story concept rooted directly in a universal human emotion.
* Write a Complete Rough Draft: Push past creative blocks to output a full, page-one-to-end rough draft of your original screenplay.
* Execute a Comprehensive Rewrite: Systematically tear down your initial draft, stripping out pacing fat and sharpening dialogue subtext to submit a polished final script.
* Provide Professional Script Coverage: Act as a critical collaborator by reading, evaluating, and writing detailed analytical reviews for three screenplays written by your classmates.
* Compete in the Peer Showcase: Submit your final script to the class network, where peer scores will determine the official top-tier script leaderboard published two weeks after graduation.
Your Instructor
