Your Own Cinematic Vocabulary

Catalog description

Prerequisite: a prior film course In a world filled with moving images, we are all highly capable spectators as well as screenwriters. In this course, we will deepen and complement our existing knowledge of the cinematic medium, challenge our assumptions, and experiment with new ways of conceiving and making cinema. This course will explore a creative and deep examination of the foundations and processes of writing with images and sounds, unveiling the knowledge that students already have and working from there. The course will provide a path to a certain type of sensitivity, which will help writers create not just the screenplay for this course but also contribute to all of their screenplays to follow. Understanding the capacity of the medium will be the most important course objective. Introducing a variety of ways in which film can be made and seen—from contemporary to classical screenwriting sensitivities and from European to Latin American filmmaking—the idea will be to expand our knowledge of the variety and range of films beyond the most mainstream productions. What are the fundamental skills needed for writing a film? What is the time of observation that writers need in order to be able to translate their ideas into words? The script is a descriptive representation of the images and sounds that the writer has created in their imagination, beginning with the construction of an image that nests a story and exploring its possible forms and shapes, imagining characters from the inside outward, and then situating them in the image to let them grow; in other words, to be able to pack entire worlds of thought, feeling, and imagination into the writing of scenes. General Politics of the Image