A new writing class offered by UNM Continuing Education started this evening, and I hopped in on this one as well. Called “Fade In”, the course is specifically on screenwriting, and it is being taught by an enthusiastic instructor named Marc Calderwood.

Marc, a former longtime owner of Rio Grande Travel here in town, discovered around 2000 that he was tired of running a business and that he wanted to write instead, so he sold his company and dove in head first into creative writing. He’s written quite a number of things, including short and long screenplays, a number of which have won him a few contests, so in time it made sense to him that he could also teach screenplay writing out of his experiences. And that’s how we met. He was the teacher tonight, and I was the student.

For a first class, Marc covered some fundamental information about writing stories, but his overview of the process was valuable, and within it, he hit a few points that stood out to me for the screenplay writer.

– A short is any film project that is shorter than 90 minutes. A feature is a film project that is 90 to 120 minutes in length.
– A script translates from paper to screen at a rate of a minute a page.
– 300,000 new scripts are written each year. The odds of yours standing out is slim without some writing and formatting considerations.
– Scripts by new (unknown) screenwriters over 120 pages in length get tossed, unless your uncle owns a studio.
– Your title page must be correctly formatted, or the reader will probably dump it.
– “Objectives/Goals” was my main takeaway from tonight. Your main character must have outer/extrinsic/external goals they want to fulfill in the story, and they must have inner/internal/intrinsic goals they want to fulfill in the story as well. The outer goal is a specific, action-based, defined achievement that is stated in the script. The inner goal may not be explicit, but it is there nevertheless, and it is the accomplishment of something internal for their satisfaction. “The woman wanted and found love.”
– If a main character’s goal is not made clear to the reader/viewer early in the story, the reader/viewer has a tendency to put the story down. People want to know what the character is about and striving for early on in the work- chapter 1. Provide that, or chance having your story put aside.
– A story’s theme is what you are trying to say to the reader through your story. The theme of “Finding Nemo” was “overcoming fear through love.”
– All opposition faced by the protagonist of a story is personal. A character may face the hardships of nature as malevolent, but ultimately, it is other people who oppose the protagonist.
– The one sentence description of your story idea is called a “log line”, and it is the same thing as those short TV show plot synopses we used to find and read in TV Guide. Creating a good log line for your writing project is critical for helping you to keep your writing on track. A good log line distills the dramatic narrative into a simple plot and emotional guide, toward which the final writing can be shaped, so if you can get your log line right, you will help yourself in staying on track with your project.

In our little class of teacher and six students, we watched the introduction to “Romancing the Stone”, which Marc pointed out demonstrated a story giving the viewer protagonist goals, a story theme, genre, and opposition right away, and talked for a bit about objectives and goals, and log lines- the two concepts I learned tonight that I valued the most.

I am still desiring to somehow get a screenplay for De Anza done. I have shelved it for a while, just because life took over this summer, but I think about it still when I am out shopping or driving around and my mind wanders.

Our exercise before nest week’s class is to come up with a log line for a screenplay we’d be interested in doing. It’s a perfect time to get my notes back out on De Anza and think again about how one might make a film about him. And I’ll apply the log line exercise to giving that project a summary sentence.

The screenwriting class meets for 6 weeks. I am looking forward to learning more about how to write a script, and also, specifically, how to also approach the De Anza project, and make some progress in shaping it a bit.