Bavaria Studios Geiselgasteig
3./4. und 10./11. März 2012

Learn powerful new story development techniques from idea to script to screen with master development experts Tom Schlesinger and Keith Cunningham.  Through lecture, film clips and actual development sessions, you will learn the secrets of  Creative Flow Continuity, Solution-Oriented Development, and Evolving and Unfolding the Creative Core of your stories.

Day One: From Concept to Treatment

    * How to recognize the relative strengths and potential audiences for your story  ideas

    * How to begin from starting points that fit your creative temperament: real- world research,         passionately held values, reasoned argument, or intuitive  imagery

    * How the FOUR DEVELOPMENT MODELS can guide you in the early steps  of developing       your concept

    * How to orchestrate the text and subtext of your story idea

Day Two: From Treatment to Screenplay

    * Learn to use the FOUR DEVELOPMENT MODELS to give you confidence  and accelerate  your work

    * Learn the screenplay structure/storytelling idiom that best fits your goals

    * Create the solid story and plot that clearly expresses your Creative Core idea

    * Discover and dramatically articulate the Character/Plot/Theme unity of your  work

    * Learn solution-oriented techniques for working with collaborators

Day Three: Sharpening Your Vision through Revisions and Re-Writes

    * Discover the positive power of revisions to focus and crystallize your Creative  Core into             your screenplay

    * Learn how interactive techniques such as improv, constellations, and  scene/beat analysis         can improve your re-writing

    * The real story is the story the writer discovers in the act of writing:  discover how to see                 through your own blind spots as a writer

    * Collaborating with the director to weave visual motifs from the director’s vision into the                 screenplay, and from the screenplay into the production  design

Day Four: From Script to Screen

    * Refine and perfect the cinematic quality of your story

    * Refining your writing to fit the actors cast in your project

    * Refining your story according to the practical limits of the budget

    * Learn how editing is in fact the last draft of your screenplay, and a great  opportunity for               important revisions

    * Gain valuable tools that can be used in your next screenplay

Over the past 4 years, while my writing and seminars have continued to grow, I have also been actively dialoguing with my colleagues in the film and TV media about the impact of climate change——and specifically about how we in the media can become more proactively involved in helping society envision and create a more sustainable future.

This led me to create, in 2009, The Story Arks Institute—you can find out more about it in the Upcoming menu.  In September 2009 I attended the UNESCO conference on Broadcast Media and Climate Change at UNESCO headquarters in Paris.  The conference was instructive for me in many ways and gave me a chance to make new friends in scientific, administrative, and communications fields related to climate change and the challenges of the future.  It also led me to ask the question: "In relation to climate change, to what extent are the media part of the solution, and to what extent are they part of the problem?"  Out of this are growing new articles, the outline for a new book, and a new impetus for The Story Arks Institute.

Since 2009, I have been on many panels discussing these topics, such as at the Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum in Bonn, Germany in June 2010.  I have also initiated projects to bring talented young film- and video-makers, musicians and designers together with the scientists and important NGOs that need to bring out their messages more forcefully through the media.

I'd love to have your input on the subject of the media and climate change, and on the media's relationship to society in general.  Feel free to use the e-mail links under Contact on the main menu bar.

 I am working on two new feature film projects that I plan to direct as well as write, and I find myself having some new reflections on what drama means to me.  As a seminar leader and consultant, my job is to be flexible, to be able to help a writer no matter what idiom, genre, style, or budget he or she is working in, with whatever character/plot/theme challenges.  I have to find the objectivity to stand back and ask what will serve the story.

With my own personal projects, the question becomes: what authorial choices are best suited to what I have to express?  One of these projects is very contemporary, gritty, and in a realistic idiom—while the second is an adaptation of a novel that mixes romanticism and expressionism as they both move through the life of a painter.  So, what is important to me that I want to bring to both projects?

 One element is what I have come to call the dignity of drama.  For me, drama is a humanistic science whose field of study is human conflict: its sources, its motives, its dynamics, its consequences.  Drama is about how people move through crisis and dilemma, and how they are changed by that process.  Here is where Joseph Campbell's paradigm of The Hero's Journey comes in.  The models elaborated in my seminars and in my book The Soul of Screenwriting are all tools to arrive at the integrity of human motives and actions in the process of growth through crisis.  If our work did not arrive at such a level of artistic integrity, then drama would have no lessons to give its audience.

I think that it is in the act of seeking this integrity that I experience the dignity of drama.

 The Soul of Screenwriting, available at Amazon and at leading bookstores. 

Buy the book!!