Watching Movies: Learn from the Masters and Become a Better Writer
In this 10-week course, Bryan Young will take you through some of the master filmmakers and writers of the past—Alfred Hitchcock, William Goldman, George Lucas, Edgar Wright, Steven Spielberg, and more—and give you a peek behind the curtain of their work and how they crafted stories.
We all want to be better storytellers. We all watch movies. What better way to maximize your time than to learn to do both at the same time?
In this 10-week course, we’ll take you through some of the master filmmakers and writers of the past—Alfred Hitchcock, William Goldman, George Lucas, Edgar Wright, Steven Spielberg, and more—and give you a peek behind the curtain of their work and how they crafted stories.
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN:
- How to watch films like a writer
- How to leverage the juxtaposition between scenes
- How to craft better dialogue
- How to better structure a story
- How to adapt techniques to prose or screenwriting
- How to amp up the tension in your stories
- Practical applications
There are tricks of storytelling that have been used since the dawn of cinema, and they have bled into storytelling of all types. You'll learn how to harness this for your own writing, whether it’s writing for the screen or in prose. We'll discuss the structure of stories, the art of good dialogue, layering in exposition, and how to elevate every scene to its highest and best use.
This class will take you through some of the best films and techniques and help you understand how you can wield films to be a better storyteller. It will help you understand how to see what makes films tick and how you can set that watch for your own stories to make you a better writer.
Some of the films we'll watch for class include:
- Rear Window
- Seven Samurai
- Lawrence of Arabia
- Sabotage (1936)
- Raiders of the Lost Ark
- Casablanca
- Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope
- Shaun of the Dead
- Hot Fuzz
- Misery
- Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
- The Princess Bride
- And more!
Assignments will include watching movies and identifying techniques taught in class to help expand understanding. How can tracking the timecode of a film help you better understand pacing? How can Alfred Hitchcock help you better understand the power in a juxtaposition of images? How can watching films with intermissions teach us how to better position the beginnings and endings of chapters?
This is just a taste of the sort of assignments we'll spend the next 10 weeks going through. Join us and start learning from the masters today!
Who Should Take This Course?
Anyone who watches movies and wants to become a better writer. The techniques we'll learn through class will benefit prose writers as well as screenwriters and all points in between. If you like movies and you like writing, then this is a course designed to marry those two things.
Learn from an expert instructor!
Bryan Young (he/they) works across many different media. His work as a writer and producer has been called "filmmaking gold" by The New York Times. He's also published comic books with Slave Labor Graphics and Image Comics. He's been a regular contributor for the Huffington Post, StarWars.com, Star Wars Insider magazine, SYFY, /Film, and was the founder and editor-in-chief of the geek news and review site Big Shiny Robot! In 2014, he wrote the critically acclaimed history book, A Children’s Illustrated History of Presidential Assassination. He co-authored Robotech: The Macross Saga RPG has written two books in the BattleTech Universe: Honor's Gauntlet and A Question of Survival. His latest book, The Big Bang Theory Book of Lists is a #1 Bestseller on Amazon. He teaches writing for Writer’s Digest, Script Magazine, and at the University of Utah. Follow him on Twitter @swankmotron.
Top screenwriting and film publication, founded in 1989, published by Active Interest Media. Twitter: @scriptmag
