What Do You Learn The First Week Of An MFA Screenwriting Class? by Marty Lang
Film Courage: We’d like to hear about your first day or week in the MFA screenwriting program. What topics were initially taught? Was everything an introduction to the courses?
Marty Lang, Screenwriter/Director and Assistant Professor of Film at the University of Central Arkansas/Director: It was a little bit of both. The first semester we had three classes. We had an Introduction into Screenplay Analysis and that was with Professor Edson [Eric Edson of California State University Northridge]. That was the beginning of his explanation of screenplay structure. We didn’t actually write in that class but that first class was sort of like a top level introduction to the terms he would be using, kind of a general overview of what the structure paradigm is and then sort of an assignment where we had to watch a film and then break down the first act of that film of what happens in every single scene.
That sort of built on to more things that we would learn later where we would do breakdowns of entire scripts of entire films. But that first class was just sort of an introduction of terms and basic overview of what that structure was.
We had a class called The Short Screenplay and that was a class where we needed to write about 30-to-45 page script that could be anything, it could be a TV pilot, it could be the beginning of a feature, it could be a webseries, pretty much whatever we wanted…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
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