From black ink on white paper to colourful images that dance, leap, and shout…

The tools of screenwriting: from the idea, to the outline, to the script.

How do we move from a sheet of paper to a dark room filled with people watching images and sounds unfold? How do words become Matrix? What does it mean to write a film? What is a screenplay, and why is it called that?

The course is open to everyone and does not require specific prior knowledge—only the desire to explore the world of visual storytelling.

The aim of the course is to provide the essential tools needed to learn how to tell stories through images and to think in images: how to create them and how to shape them, using ink and a sheet of paper. This is the work of the screenwriter.

We will spend 30 hours together. We will use short and feature-length films, writing exercises, and any other teaching materials—visual or otherwise—that may prove useful along the way.

Our path will focus on understanding what visual storytelling is and, in particular, what cinema is. We will discuss Story and Structure: what we want to tell and how we organise our narrative so that it is solid, comprehensible, and engaging for those who will receive it. We will use tools that are older than cinema itself, capable of telling stories by evoking images without being able to generate them.

We will talk about Plot and the Characters who inhabit our story: their lives, their development, their psychology. We will weave together characters, narrator, and audience within the intricate network of the “Game of Knowledge”: who knows what. The plot has a Rhythm—events unfold in succession, leading us to talk about Compression, Causality, Conflict, and Crisis. All terms beginning with the same “C” as “cinema,” and essential to it.

We will also touch on other roles involved in the creation of a film: how do actors, directors, editors, and costume designers relate to the written text we will hand over to them? We will discuss Mise-en-scène, the creation of images, and the cinematic signs that give meaning to our narrative.

We will consider the audience, always keeping in mind what we want to tell them and how we choose to tell it. We will talk about Life—stories are as complex, unpredictable, and sometimes tedious as life itself; they draw inspiration from it, and we end up inventing very little, but that little will be shaped through the specific tools of visual storytelling.

We will write and rewrite, paying particular attention to the Outline and sketching a Screenplay. We will constantly reflect on our work, striving to reach a narrative that satisfies us and that might one day be presented to a producer.

By the end of the course, we hope to have provided participants with an initial grounding in the tools needed to start thinking about and taking their first steps along the path of writing for cinema—whether as a possible future profession or for personal enrichment. It will be a rich and engaging experience.