Writing a successful screenplay

Date: Saturday, February 23, 2008
Time: 9:30 am-3:30 pm
Location: Pyle Center, 702 Langdon St.
Fee: $125, includes a critique of your first 10 pages; other critiques available for additional fee
Program number: #7104
How to register

Description:

Learn how to write a screenplay that grabs producers, agents, and actors—from a writer/teacher who's helped many writers turn their scripts around for good "reads" in Hollywood. Beginners find this workshop an excellent launching point; experienced writers frustrated by "passes" also find it a must. Novelists can take home new ways to structure their stories. Includes Top 10 Don't-Go-There Mistakes and Page One/First Five Pages tests. Several of Christine's class participants have gone on to place high in or win contests, and option..

Recommended movie to see before class: "Little Miss Sunshine."

Topics include:

• FADE IN to greatness: The Page One Test
• The “First Five Pages Test”
• “Top Ten List of Don’t-Go-There Mistakes” screenwriters make
• Story concepts—how to test and reshape your ideas
• Characterization reasons for a “pass”
• Story structure reasons for a “pass”
• What matters most in the middle
• Scene sculpting tips (before & after exercises)
• You’re told to be more “cinematic.” What does that mean?
• Tips for making good dialogue great (before & after exercises)
• Formatting dos and don’ts (sample script pages included)
• Marketing reality: What to do and what’s a waste of time
• How to write the necessary “one sheet/one page/cover sheet” (samples included)
  

Your instructor:

Christine DeSmet is a screenwriter, novelist, short story writer, and has recently finished a new full-length play. She also teaches screenwriting online through UW-Madison. She coordinates the annual Writers' Institute and the Write-by-the-Lake Writer's Workshop & Retreat. Co-authored with Peggy Williams, her true-story film script "Chinaware-Fragile" was the winner of a past Slamdance Film Festival writing contest and optioned to New Line Cinema. With Peggy, Christine has optioned other projects and is marketing several screenplays. Their first play, "CLIMAX!," about a writer, finaled in the Top Ten in the 2007 Wisconsin Wrights New Play Project. Christine is a fellowship graduate of the Warner Bros. Sitcom Writers Workshop, and is a member of Wisconsin Screenwriters Forum, Romance Writers of America, Electronic Publishing Internet Connection (EPIC), and Writers Guild of America, East. Her romantic suspense, Spirit Lake, is an award-winning, best-selling novel for publisher Hard Shell Word Factory. Her novels are represented by 3 Seas Literary Agency. She has received rave reviews for short stories in a humorous romantic mystery series called "Mischief in Moonstone." Those have been published in anthologies from Whiskey Creek Press, with new editions issued through 2008; excerpts can be found at www.JewelsoftheQuill.com. She has a Master's degree in journalism from UW-Madison and grew up on a farm near Barneveld, Wisconsin.

For details about this workshop, contact coordinator Christine DeSmet, 608-262-3447, or e-mail cdesmet@dcs.wisc.edu.

 

How to register

By phone: Call 608-262-7942.

By mail: Print and mail the UW Continuing Studies registration form.

By fax: Print and fax the UW Continuing Studies registration form.

Online: Secure online registration is available for this program.

 

 

Related resources:

• Business writing workshops: Offered through the UW-Madison Department of Professional Development and Applied Studies.

   

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