Sean Lawrence

  :: Activity   1.1 Welcome to The Business of Creative Writing ( Due: Mon, 06 Jun | Status: Not Completed ) :: Objective: In Mind Your Business: A Hollywood Agent's Guide to Your Writing Career, Michelle Wallerstein writes, "A writer is really a small business." The textbooks for this course have been carefully chosen to give you the most comprehensive overview of the business of doing business in film, television, comics and games. These textbooks are:   • Mind Your Business: A Hollywood Agent's Guide to Your Writing Career by Michelle Wallerstein • I Liked It, Didn't Love It: Screenplay Development From the Inside Out by Rona Edwards & Monika Skerbelis • The Ultimate Guide to Video Game Writing and Design by Flint Dille & John Zuur Platten   If you're writing a comic book, you may be thinking, "What do these books have to teach me? I'm a comic book writer, not a screenwriter." Not true. You're a writer in an...

    2.2 Game Characters   1. Read Game Writing Chapter 6 “Game Characters”   2. Consider: a. In contrasting a character with an “icon,” Walsh is not talking about art quality or detail, but about the way in which many games used to have (and some still have) a “player character” without a personality, one which exists only to allow the player to play the game. b. Consider the conflict between creating a player character with a lot of personality and allowing a player to decide how his or her character will behave. c. Sometimes, a way to balance freedom against personality is to make the player character mostly “blank,” but to lavish attention and care on all of the other characters. d. Games Extra: computer and video games suffer from an excess of two kinds of protagonists: tough, rugged, macho guys with attitude problems, and tough but impossibly Barbie-shaped girls with attitude problems. If your protagonist is tending in either of these directi...

  ( Due: Sun, 1st Jan | Status: Not Completed )   1. Watch “Inner Life” Video https://youtu.be/VHA2sH87Wng   2. This week we’re going to have more podcast lectures than usual, and the lectures will overlap the reading to a degree. It is very important to do both, as the ideas we’ll be considering this week are some of the most difficult of the class.   3. Make time this week to look at at least one of these games that deal with psychology and memory: consider how they use these techniques to develop personality and motivation. a. Creaky Old Memory: http :// www . creakyoldmemory . com / b. Opera Omnia: http :// www . increpare . com /2009/02/ opera - omnia / c. Façade: http :// www . interactivestory . net / CAUTION: the Mac version of this game seems to be broken - unless you have access to a Windows PC, you'll need to try one of the other two options. d. Creaky Old Memory and Façade are both fairly easy to play (not necessarily so easy to ...

  News & Updates From Our Master Cats Soul  Beat Sheet While 2020 certainly took a toll on our souls, one of  the  cinematic bright spots of  the  year was Pixar's  Soul ,  released to Disney+ on December 25th. The  animation studio's first film to feature an African-American protagonist is a sweet and powerful exploration of  the  measure of one music teacher's life... and on this week's blog, we bring you  the  beat sheet by Don Roff. READ MORE » Save   the   Cat ! ®   Storytelling Webinar with Jessica Brody   Sign Ups Still Open! Enroll Now to Get  the  First Two Recorded Sessions, and to Attend  the  Live Webinar with Q&A! Join us for new sessions of  the  record-breaking  Save   the   Cat !® Storytelling Masterclass, presented LIVE by  the  best-selling author of  Save   the   Cat ! Writes a Novel , Jessica Brod...

1.5 Discussion Board Choose one the following and post a 200 word response by Wednesday 11:59 EST. Respond to two other posts by Sunday 11:59 EST 1. One thing you can see from Wright’s discussion is that the production process is collaborative, complicated and expensive. However, you can create inexpensive animation programs and even series. A high cost production does not necessarily produce a satisfying, quality program. As a writer it is your job to know your audience and your budget and to work within these parameters to write effective scripts for these parameters. The writer is in a unique position to make the most of animation primarily by developing good characters, clever dialogue and interesting stories. One thing you must do as a writer is to give yourself sufficient time to know your characters and to develop good stories for these characters before the expensive production clock starts ticketing. Knowing what works in animation – movement, visual gags, exagg...

Character Development 1. Watch Keynote: Character Development 2. Read Ch. 5 in Wright 3. Questions to consider: a. Why is it important to develop characters into three-dimensional personalities? b. How does plot and action come from character? c. How does character arc help move the story forward? d. How do the main character’s flaws help create the final climatic scene in a script. e. Think about some of your own experiences: • most embarrassing moment • biggest fear • something funny that happened to you • your knowledge of subcultures and other worlds such as sports, workplace, other cultures, hobbies, etc How you can use some of your own experiences and translate them into experiences that develop your characters? 4. Understand the following concepts: a. Using character profiles to develop character b. Using your own experiences to develop your characters as well as observation and imagination c. Conflict and story come from characters 5. As ...

Goals: Writing for television animation and comics often means coming up with a number of story ideas that you can pitch to story editors and producers. These springboards are usually brief (but longer than a log line) and can be about everything from characters flaws, current ideas and situations, unusual locations, a theme, or an exciting visual. You would usually pitch three ideas (3) and then have several more one or two sentence ideas (sometimes called spitballs) that you can also pitch if your main springboards don’t hit. The goal of this assignment is to generate a number of exciting ideas that are fun, fresh and have potential for conflict, action, humor and the big climatic finish. Then, take one of these ideas and develop it into a one to two page premise. Instructions: Submit three springboards of 25-100 words each and a premise of one to two pages. These springboards must use the characters you developed in the Character Profile Assignment. You automaticall...