» Posts Tagged ‘screenwriting’
Sundance Institute Screenwriters Lab Now Accepting Applications for January 2014
After posting about the Academy Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting now accepting applications for 2013, one of our NFS readers asked which screenwriting contests I recommend. Well, I recommend screenwriting opportunities that will further your career – namely, making contacts in the industry or finding ways to turn your writing into films yourself (that’s why you’re here at NFS, right?). Beyond making industry contacts, I think there are a few screenwriting opportunities worth considering. The Academy Nicholl Fellowships is one. The Sundance Institute Screenwriters Lab is another — a long-standing program known for championing emerging voices in screenwriting and helping those writers turn their words into films. Sundance Institute has now opened applications online for the January 2014 Screenwriters Lab. More »
With the final major guild awards behind us, (Argo and Zero Dark Thirty won last night’s WGA awards for Adapted and Original Screenplays, respectively), pundits can finally channel all of their attention and prognostications on the big show, the Academy Awards (as if they weren’t already). Ten screenplays are nominated, but of course, only two will win. This year, however, that doesn’t mean we won’t get to hear from some of the other writing nominees about their Oscar experiences. More »
The annual Writers Guild Awards are upon us once again, and the Los Angeles show is streaming live tonight at 9PM Eastern and 6PM Pacific (a simultaneous show is also happening at WGA East). A number of the movie screenplays that are nominated for awards have been made available by the studios, so if you want to read some, be sure to check them out while they’re still online. Click through to watch the show. More »
The New Screenplay Standard Font is Here: Courier Prime from Quote-Unquote Apps (And It's Free)
Fonts are sexy. Okay, maybe not, but they are a major element of print and web design. Heck, you’re looking at one right now. Fonts impact how we perceive information. I bet Koo is pouring over hundreds of fonts at this very moment trying to pick the right ones for the website redesign (I vote for Mistral). For screenwriters, however, we’re essentially stuck with one and only one font: Courier. More specifically, for those of us using Final Draft, we’re stuck with Courier Final Draft. Courier is boring. It’s bland. It’s standard. Until recently, there was nothing you or I could do about it. Thanks to John August, Alan Dague-Greene and Ryan Nelson of Quote-Unquote Apps, however, now we have Courier Prime, a better Courier font designed specifically for screenplays. Even better, it’s free. More »
Why Make a Short? Why Run a Kickstarter Campaign So Early? The MANCHILD Q&A
In the comments section of my more-contentious-than-I-expected post about making a short that ties into my forthcoming feature MANCHILD, there were a lot of questions about my project, as well as the overall wisdom of making a short in order to fundraise for a feature. Reading through the comments, I realized I could’ve delved deeper into the timeline of what’s happened since my Kickstarter campaign. So, to answer some of the questions posed in the comments — as well as to generally shoot the shit about filmmaking — I sat down (virtually) with NFS editor Joe Marine for an wide-ranging video chat. More »
May the Best Idea Win: Animator Lucas Martell Outlines His Ideas Tournament
One of the main challenges all creatives face is not only generating new ideas for content but also determining which ideas are worth pursuing and which ideas should be discarded. Many new ideas seem great at first, but after several weeks of brainstorming, outlining and writing, too many ideas lead to dead ends and wasted energy. With this in mind, I was happy to come across a recent video podcast posting from award-winning Austin-based animator Lucas Martell focusing on his technique for conceiving new story ideas and discerning which ones to pursue. More »
Most screenwriting competitions are simply out to take your money. They won’t help you with your career. In fact, writing a great screenplay and making industry contacts who may then consider your screenplay will help you with your screenwriting career much more than a screenwriting contest. In other words, hone your screenwriting skills and cultivate industry relationships. So, as far as screenwriting competitions go, if you submit to any at all, I suggest only submitting to those that can actually help you launch or further a screenwriting career. As such, very few meet this criteria. One of the few is the Academy Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting, now open for applications for 2013. More »
Exclusive Interview: Writer Chris Galletta on Sundance 2013 Film 'Toy's House'
For those of us who can remember life before we were plugged into technology, we may remember a time when we had nothing better to do but disappear into a forest with our buddies and wreak havoc out of the eyesight and earshot of the grown-up world. Those days, however, have come to pass. Now that Sundance 2013 has also come to pass, so too shall our series of interviews with screenwriters of feature films from this year’s U.S. Dramatic Competition. For our final interview, we present our conversation with Toy’s House screenwriter Chris Galletta, who describes the influence of Amblin Entertainment movies on his first produced feature-length screenplay, the waiting game to find the right director for the project, and the decision to stop trying to write like the next Charlie Kaufman and start writing what he knows. More »
One of the more controversial screenplays of the 2012 award contenders was also the only screenplay of the ten Oscar-nominated screenplays not available for legal download for your consideration. Until now. Thanks to Sony Pictures, Mark Boal’s screenplay for Zero Dark Thirty has been declassified and put online for dissemination, dissection, and analysis by screenwriting aficionados, and perhaps a few U.S. senators and representatives, too (or at least their aides). More »
As the days wind down to the official balloting for the Academy Awards, the last holdouts for putting their award-contending screenplays online for your consideration are finally making their moves. Of course, voting members most likely received their copies of these screenplays to consider privately months ago. For the rest of us unwashed masses, 20th Century Fox has finally posted David Magee’s adaptation of Yann Martel’s best-selling novel Life of Pi online for free and legal download. More »
Exclusive Interview: Writer/Director Kyle Patrick Alvarez on Sundance 2013 Film 'C.O.G.'
As the Sundance Film Festival continues in Park City, we continue our series of interviews with the writers of the Sundance 2013 U.S. Dramatic Competition films. Today, we present our interview with Kyle Patrick Alvarez, writer/director of C.O.G., based on a short story by author and storyteller David Sedaris. C.O.G. (which stands for “Child of God”) marks the first adaptation of a Sedaris story to film – or more importantly, the first time Sedaris has given a filmmaker permission to adapt one of his stories to film. During our interview, Alvarez describes adapting a story from one of the most distinctive storytellers of our time, how his experiences with his first feature film shaped his approach to this project, and what Sundance means to him now after getting rejected with his first feature film. More »
The awards machine is now in full throttle. Not that we necessarily care what pundits think about the awards race (or even the awards themselves), but we may have the pundits and their chatter to thank for our latest screenplay available for legal download for consideration: the long-awaited Argo, written by Chris Terrio, adapted from Joshuah Bearman’s Wired magazine article and Tony Mendez’s autobiography. More »
Savor Lush ‘Moonrise Kingdom’ Visual Screenplay with BTS Stills, Maps, and Shooting Diagrams
In the spirit of consideration for the highest honors a work may receive in our field, we have been keeping you up to date with a number of scripts seeking nomination — one of the earliest of these was Moonrise Kingdom, which has in fact been nominated for Best Original Screenplay. Interestingly enough, and in contrast to the rest of the scripts you may have caught so far, the script for Moonrise Kingdom is now also available in a new, very unique textual-visual version, complete with an interactive navigator. Read on for the details of this ‘Screenplay 2.0′ below. More »
Exclusive Interview: Writer Darci Picoult on Sundance 2013 Film 'Mother of George'
As writers, some stories grab us and won’t let go. They hit us in the gut, they work their way into our bones, and they won’t release us until we write the story. For films, writing the story is merely the beginning. For many independent films, writing the story launches a journey over many years to see the film finally come to life. For Sundance 2013 U.S. Dramatic Competition film Mother of George, the project first traveled to Sundance as part of the Screenwriters Lab and Directors Lab back in 2005, and the story’s origin goes back further than that. To share with us the long journey of Mother of George from concept to finished film, we continue our series of interviews with Sundance U.S. Dramatic Competition screenwriters with an extensive and generous interview with the film’s screenwriter and a producer of the film, Darci Picoult. More »
Exclusive Interview: Author and Co-Writer Shannon Hale on Sundance 2013 Film 'Austenland'
Jane Austen has certainly been fodder for several film adaptations (thank you, public domain and large fervent fanbase). To further illustrate this point, at least nine versions of Pride and Prejudice have been produced as films, mini-series or television series with a tenth film version currently in development (and no, I’m not including the future production of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies on that list). Sometimes, it makes you wonder if this obsession with Jane Austen has gone too far (blasphemous, I know). To answer this very question, we get to look forward to the Sundance 2013 U.S. Dramatic Competition film Austenland, adapted from the novel by Shannon Hale, directed by Jerusha Hess (Napolean Dynamite, Nacho Libre, Gentlemen Broncos) in her feature film directorial debut, and co-written by Hale and Hess. In our continuing series of exclusive interviews with the screenwriters of Sundance 2013 U.S. Dramatic Competition films, we hear from Shannon Hale on her experiences adapting her novel into a screenplay and collaborating with Jerusha Hess. More »
A few months ago I finished the screenplay for my feature MANCHILD (for now, at least, until we move to the next stage and start making changes for talent/locations/budget/etc). I’ll have more updates on the project soon, but suffice to say there’s been a long rewriting process since I ran my Kickstarter campaign over a year ago. And while this wasn’t the first screenplay I’ve written, it’s certainly the best, and the one on which I’ve worked the longest and hardest. Over the past two years, here are the things that have helped my screenwriting process. More »
Exclusive Interview: Writer/Director Stacie Passon on Her Sundance 2013 Film 'Concussion'
With Sundance 2013 just around the corner, NoFilmSchool is reaching out to the screenwriters of the Sundance 2013 U.S. Dramatic Competition films (most of whom are also the directors as one might suspect from a Sundance line-up) to ask them about their screenplays, their screenwriting processes, and their experiences bringing their screenplays to life as films. We hope to publish a series of interviews over the next several days and weeks from these writers as schedules permit. First up, we hear from Stacie Passon, writer/director of Concussion. More »
At the beginning of 2012, I made a New Year’s resolution. Mind you, I never make New Year’s resolutions, but last year I did because I was so annoyed at my lack of progress with my screenwriting. I decided I was going to wake up at 5:30 am every morning to write my best screenplay ever and that screenplay would get noticed. With the exception of some weekends and family trips, I managed to drag myself out of bed and focus on my screenwriting every day. The result? I rewrote a screenplay that made it to the semifinal round of the 2012 Nicholl Fellowships and got the interest of a few producers and managers, I finally hammered out a long-gestating comedy spec that I posted online when it suddenly became DOA during the rewrite process because the exact same movie came out this fall, and I outlined my next screenplay similar in tone and style to my Nicholl script. Am I happy with the results? Yes. Am I satisfied? Not even close. So, since I’m not keen on giving out my own advice on screenwriting since I’m not a professional screenwriter, I’ll share with you how I plan to write my best screenplay ever this year, and maybe you can too. More »
2012 Screenwriters Reveal the Toughest Scenes They Wrote
Many screenwriters talk about the difficulty of facing the blank page as they start page one of their screenplays. The desire to get the opening of the screenplay right can overwhelm, even paralyze. Yet, as the screenplay finally begins and takes shape, the first page is not necessarily the most difficult page. In reality, the challenge tends to come later, not when the audience is introduced to the movie, its characters and its world, but rather when the story truly launches into what will compel the audience to stay engaged for the next 90 minutes or more. Thanks to Kyle Buchanan at Vulture (and Movies Editor for New York Magazine), we have a series of screenwriters from some of the most acclaimed films of 2012 describing in their own words what were the toughest scenes to write in their own screenplays. More »
One of the most talked about screenplays in awards contention this fall is also one of the few screenplays not available for free, legal download for your consideration: Argo. I imagine for guild members and members of the Academy, Warner Brothers has most likely sent out copies of this screenplay, but for the rest of us mere mortals that would like to consider the screenplay for educational purposes, it’s “Argo [bleep] yourself.” So, instead of reading the screenplay, why not hear from the screenwriter himself? Thanks to David Poland and his DP/30 series, we have an in-depth interview with Argo screenwriter Chris Terrio, covering his filmmaking history, his screenwriting approach, and specifically his process for adapting the original Wired article by Joshuah Bearman for the Argo screenplay. More »
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