For writers, directors, producers, editors, actors, and industry professionals
When you write screenplays, you go on a parallel journey with your characters that the audience will ultimately experience when they watch your film. What you experience when you write is a powerful guide that helps you create authentic, compelling characters through stories that engage the deepest passions of your audience.
This groundbreaking workshop will illuminate your creative journey from idea to screenplay to premiere. The focus will be on how to discover and express the Creative Core of your story — the unity of plot, character, and theme — that guides you through the writing, shooting and editing of your film.
You will learn Five Solution-Oriented Development Models to keep you on track while advancing from story outline to screenplays to re-writes to the shooting script.
You will also learn Collaborative Learning Techniques to maintain an optimal resonance with your characters and to connect with your audience.
Topics to be Covered
- Finding the Deep Core of your Stories
- Point of View and Parallel Realities
- The Power of the Writer-Character-Audience Connection
- Going deeper into your creative resources
- Balancing the analytical and the creative
- The Essence of Drama
- The dynamic tension of character paradox
- The Unity of Plot, Character and Theme
- Structure as constellations of characters moving through Time and Space
- Plot-Character-Theme Symbiosis/ Personal Connections to Universal Themes
- Stories as “paths of growth through crisis”
- The Archaeology of Character
- 16 Storytelling Vertebrae
- Structural Strategies in multi-character dramas
- Navigating through the Deep Core Crisis
- Restructuring between drafts
- Writing from the Heart
- What to do when you get lost and confused
- Letting your characters live their lives
- Putting theory into practice
Price: $325
(20% discount: DGC, WGC, CMPA, ACCT, DOC, ACTRA, WIFT, AFCOOP, DELUXE clients; students & previous clients)
To register:
Patricia AquinoTel: 905-901-1200
Tom’s extraordinary guidance on my scripts for “Nowhere in Africa” (Academy Award Winner) and “Beyond Silence” (Academy Award Nominee) enriched my award-winning films immensely.
—Caroline Link, writer-director Nowhere in Africa (Academy Award, Best Foreign Film)
Tom’s wisdom, inspiration, and deep understanding of character and story continue to guide me on each screenwriting journey.
—Pamela Gray, screenwriter Conviction, Music of the Heart, A Walk on the Moon
Tom has the amazing ability to guide writers to a place of enhanced creativity.
—Michael Lehmann, director True Blood, The Truth About Cats and Dogs