Show Don’t Tell: A Visual Guide to Cinematic Storytelling

Every successful screenwriter knows that writing for a visual medium can be much harder than it sounds. By using numerous examples, this live webinar illustrates the tried and true cinematic strategies professional scribes use to create compelling images in the mind’s eye of the reader and get their projects sold.

Today’s film audiences are more sophisticated than ever before. That’s why a screenwriter’s visual language needs to raise the bar even higher by elevating the stunning imagery that showcases their script’s narrative storyline. This webinar will enlighten the process of creating compelling visuals utilizing the written word, making every slug line, descriptive action, and even line of dialogue as visually evocative as possible. Equally important, this webinar will share the tricks of the screen trade in how a writer can conceptualize storylines so full of energy and vitality the reader will want to keep turning the script page.

This live webinar will also cover how to visually describe not only characters, but the worlds they inhabit in exciting and engaging prose. The instructor will illustrate how to create friction and conflict to visualize a story’s dramatic stakes, including strategies on how to escalate the tension for an ultimately satisfying third-act climax. Finally, several film franchise properties will be highlighted to show how their distinct and unique cinematic universes were created.

Join Jon James Miller, award-winning screenwriter, novelist, and professional story editor, to learn how to write a story rich with tantalizing visual descriptions that come alive through narrative techniques intended to excite readers and keep them reading. Jon will also show how to create a story premise that lends itself to cinematic translation, creating a movie in the mind of the reader, no matter what the genre. Writers will come away from this webinar with a visual shorthand they can utilize to make their screenplays jump off the page and actively engage the reader’s imagination.

Jon James Miller started his Hollywood career as a script reader for producers at 20th Century Fox Studios, Paramount Pictures, and MGM Studios. Jon co-wrote Adapting Sideways: How To Turn Your Screenplay Into A Publishable Novel (2010, Komenar Publishing) which chronicled the process of adapting his award-winning screenplay into Looking For Garbo, his debut novel published by Amphorae Publishing Group in 2019. Jon is a frequent contributor to SCRIPT and WRITERS DIGEST Magazine, and available for script consulting services through ScriptXpert at The Writers Store. He is represented by the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency.