If someone were to write a book of ‘Lessons from Lockdown’ – and I am sure they will! – then surely one of the most important is how much we should value the arts. How many of us were comforted during the worst times by reading, music or visual art or by being able to […]
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When practicing writing visual descriptions, the scriptwriter works towards applying the few technical rules that are required by scriptwriting standards: scene heading with indication of time and space use of active verbs in the present tense brief paragraphs no camera directions describe only what can be seen and heard Their application aims at shaping the […]
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Parentheticals in a script are mini descriptions put into dialogue (in brackets), usually to describe emotion, or what the character is doing while talking, or the way the character delivers the dialogue.
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Join OCA tutor Guy Mankowski on the 15 August at 6pm. In this session we will be discussing how to use the script form to both build and to reveal your character.
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Join OCA Moving Image course author Ruth Maclennan on the 4 February in London. Pushkin House in association with Open College of the Arts is pleased to present two recent films by Ruth. After the screening the she will be in conversation with Vlad Strukoff, Associate Professor in Film and Digital Culture at the University of Leeds.
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The following blog post is written by OCA scriptwriting student Peter La Trobe-Bateman.
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‘Don’t spend any time trying to be original if you want your film or television script to get noticed by producers.’ OCA tutor James Richards told it to them straight at last Saturday’s scriptwriting workshop at the Ilkley Literature Festival on Saturday. He compares attempts at originality to trying to build a car using British Leyland […]
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‘Great dialogue, like great music, soars off the page’, says Laura Schellhardt in ‘Screenwriting for Dummies’. Since 1927, every writer has needed to be able to write good dialogue. Not that it didn’t matter before then. It’s just that afterwards it mattered more as talkies came to the cinema screen with ‘The Jazz Singer’. By […]
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