Writing for Electronic Media

The Process of Revision

roydenm — Mon, 21 May 2007 20:19:09 +0000

Our final assignment was the first time I have produced a synopsis or professional scene. Developing the synopsis was fun because I never put together a whole story knowing that I’m going to take a section of it and make it into a narrative script. Coming up with the story idea and writing the synopsis was the easy part but doing the revisions became arduous. After receiving feedback on both the synopsis and scene I made some key changes and noticed some problems that I did not catch. The process of revision is key in almost every type of writing and it only helps the final version.

Extra credit

benjamina — Mon, 21 May 2007 03:38:30 +0000

I learned a lot in this class, but my favorite activity was actually our final project. While in college I have not really taken any classes that gave me this much creative freedom in one project. Plus I thought revision was necessary for this class. Everybody makes mistakes and it is hard to catch them, so the more people to read it the better.

Extra Credit blog by Grant

grantj — Wed, 16 May 2007 16:20:14 +0000

I learned that it takes a lot of time and creativity to make a script for any television show or movie. However, I had no idea how I was going to do this. I’ve never learned how to write a script before. With the instructions on how to write the script, I was able to overcome my doubts on how to write it, even if it’s not perfect. I’ve done all that I could to make sure the script is written in its proper format. Hopefully this will give me an insight on how professional script-writing is done.

As for the rest of this class, I liked what we’ve learned. It introduced me to how writing for media is done. The first few script assignments were my favorites because it gave me a chance to use my creativity for each one leading up to the final assignment. I hope that future writers will learn a lot when they take this course. This is so far one of the best BECA classes that I’ve taken.

Extra credit post

dudewithacamera — Tue, 15 May 2007 00:02:00 +0000

This final screenwriting project has been my favorite so far. I wrote a scene from a move in which a bank hostage falls in love with her captor. It’s hard to make a gradual transition between the hostage being completely scared to falling in love. I selected a scene to write that’s a critical turning point in her story where she begins to empathies more with the captors than the hostages.

I love to write, but writing a fiction project is new to me. I’ve always struggled with coming up with new story ideas. Before this class, I would always try to come up with complicated plots with intertwining details and lots of twists. But for as much intellectual effort I put into the story, the scripts usually sucked. The stories were always dry, awkward, and unbelievable.

In this final project, I learned that the characters are far more important to a good story than coming up with a complicated plot. If I invent believable and strong characters, the story almost naturally writes itself. All I have to do is come up with a situation and ask myself what my characters would do in that situation. From now on, I will always start with characters rather than build the characters around the plot.

EXTRA CREDIT POST

ez0es — Mon, 14 May 2007 19:25:03 +0000

I really like the concept of this class. This was not about writing essays or papers full of regurgitated information. We were writing scripts and coming up with ideas that people might one day actually perform. The class motivated me creatively and the cherry on top was the script as the final project.

At first i was having a hard time with the dialogue, but once i got started i couldnt stop. All i was doing was visualizing how things were going to happen. And once you have discovered that, a bulk of the work is done. You just have to knock out the details. It was much easier to work on when i got into the flow of a conversation and it was much easier to edit when i had something to work on. ;D

EXTRA CREDIT

janaf — Mon, 14 May 2007 17:12:37 +0000

I have learned a lot over the course of the semester. I am glad we had the chance to do mostly script writing because most other BECA classes are geared toward essay form or research writing styles.

I really enjoyed this last assignment. I can see now that writing an entire script is not only difficult but time consuming as well! I only wrote 4 pages and it seemed to take me forever. I really like script writing because it is easy to visualize a scene in my head and just write as though it is a conversation.

Well, I wish the best to everyone, graduating or not J, I hope you all find bigger and better things and happy times…

Final Post

bpeacock — Mon, 14 May 2007 06:26:34 +0000

I agree with the previous posts that say this was the best project so far. Constructing characters and scenes was a lot of fun. I really like my final script and am almost attached in a wierd way to the characters I created. The process of editing ideas is really hard. Like with most any writing, in the end, the editing is the strength of the final piece. In this industry not just any crap is going to get taken seriously. And even very good work will get rejected or just plain ignored. So you have to come with something very strong if you expect people to take notice. My emphasis in the BECA program isn’t writing, but I found script writing to be something I wouldn’t mind doing in the future. I think the different dialects and whats inside the characters’ head is what is intriguing. You don’t get that with writing advertisements or even the synopsis. Then, the way you take this idea of a character and try to portray that in dialogue, it makes me respect what writers of a really good series does. I say series especially, because there can be such a long run for the same characters. It makes me understand why they always just take a shortcut and throw a new cute little kid in a sitcom and hope it works.

Extra Credit Post

pepsimax78 — Mon, 14 May 2007 02:00:07 +0000

This last project was the best project we had so far. It gave me a chance to be completley creative, with no boarders at all. Writing the scene that i wanted to with the charicters that i wanted to was so easy that it made the project vary fun. Learning how to write a scene corectly and format the look of it to look professonal was a big helpfor the future. One of the things i learned on this last project was how to format the layout of the script. Most of my writing for other classes are book reports or book reviews, some king of cretique, or a story. In all of these cases the standerd way of writing is just fine, starting on the left boarder and writing to the right until a word fits. So i never had the opportunity to go into the set up of Word to adjust the settings until this paper. When i adjusted word i made sure that the right boader was 3.7 inches the left side was2.3 inches and i tryed to leave 1.5 to .5 in on the bottom, all things i never hadf to do before. The imagination and the thought used to create a fictional scene was not difficut, but it was challenging to come up with one single idea to write about. I had though of several diffrent themes of witch to write about, and when i finally came up with the last one about Karaoke i knew i had found a winner. Since most of my classes i am writing my reaction or opinion about something it was nice to have my own creatinve flow and storyline. I found this last project to be the most fun of the semester, i learned about formatting and creative writing and i think that this is a great way to end a semester of a creative writing class. The build up of all out creative works and what we learned in class all being revisited for the final paper was a good was to end the semester.

Extra Credit Post

kdjones — Fri, 11 May 2007 17:09:55 +0000

I’ve actually learned a lot from doing this final script. I’ve written many scripts for video productions before, where you do the audio side and the visual side, but before this assignment, I had never written an actual script. What I’ve learned is how there is so much detail that goes into writing a script, just about the format. I never realized that there was an exact number of inches needed for each different part of the script; it’s good to know, because I also didn’t realize that a company would throw a script out, if one small thing is off on the formatting; it’s kind of crazy, but I guess it does make sense since they probably receive hundreds of scripts a week.

I’ve also learned how to write dramatically and develop characters through the script, without actually having to give the audience a full background of the person beforehand. This assignment has taught me a lot, and I think it will help me in my future production classes, as well as my future in the entertainment industry.

Extra Credit post

marcusr — Fri, 11 May 2007 03:36:59 +0000

the one thing that i learned from doing this project is that i suck at writing scripts……..i couldnt come up with shit. But after all that just sitting there thinking about what to write, i came up with some stupid ass love scene. But i think that given another chance to fix or do over your project really helped.