August 2008

I was really looking forward to the screenwriting sessions, because I’ve always loved writing and had some experience of writing in other disciplines such as journalism. Our tutor, Lisa, is a script development consultant and has helped countless screenwriters hone their work. We started the session by talking about how important it is to understand your audience – we looked at the kinds of films that are popular in the UK at the moment and what makes them appealing and financially viable.

The film we will be making will be a short film of less than ten minutes, which is obviously a very different structure to a feature film. Since few of us had ever watched many short films, we talked about the characteristics that are unique to them and the things that filmmakers can do wrong when making a short. We watched a few short films in the class that demonstrated the different features that make shorter films interesting. Since we are supposed to be thinking of our own ideas already, this was really useful - I started to understand how important it is to stay simple in a short film, and how easily something that can seem a non-story at first can be made fascinating and beautiful.

Lisa asked us to jump straight in at the deep end by writing a short story off the top of our heads in the class. At first I think everyone was daunted by this task, and my head certainly felt momentarily empty! It was amazing how quickly a story came though, and when we talked about them afterwards, several really good short film ideas emerged.

In the second session we talked about character in detail and to this end we had been asked to observe someone and then to discuss them in the class and hypothesise on their back story. It was fascinating to analyse the assumptions that some people had made and the whole class got really into creating a world for each character to live in.

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Ella Vakkasova

(One-Year Practical Filmmaking) had a background in finance but had always dreamt of becoming a filmmaker. A presentation by Bernardo Bertolucci made her realise she was capable of making films and she signed up to the one-year programme four days later. After graduating she was accepted onto a prestigious MA programme at the National Film and Television School.