Screenwriting is a craft that film students need to master. Good screenwriting can be honed through the practice of writing and reading movie reviews. Below are the strategies film students can use to improve their screenwriting skills with ease.
Watching a movie in class is a great way for students to break down the narrative and uncover the underlying architecture of the story. Students can see how a film introduces characters, establishes a premise, and executes a plot, all of which allows them to experience successful storytelling techniques. This analysis can also lead them to identify recurring patterns (such as the three-act structure, character arcs, and pacing) that are important to crafting great scripts. This will help young learners write better essays for school or college. Or, they can simply use a top-tier online writing service. Having done that, they will have lots of free time to study their favorite subjects.
Characters drive every screenplay, and students must reflect on the complexity of characterization and portrayal of character transformation when they write movie reviews. They must examine how characters are developed (or not) in the film being reviewed, as well as how relationships are shown and played out over the course of the story.
Dialogue is an essential ingredient of any good screenplay. By having students review selected films, you can encourage your class to pay closer attention to how dialogue is deployed, not only as a means of characterization and plot development but also to play with narrative expectations. Examining what is said – and what isn’t – can help students hone their skills at crafting dialogue that sounds real and rings true.
Themes help to define the deeper meaning or emotional essence of a film, and by asking students to write about the themes of the movies they’re watching, you will push them to think more carefully about the themes they are developing in their own work and learn how to work them into the flow of the story.
Because film is a visual medium, a crucial part of screenwriting is describing scenes that convey emotion and narrative without dialogue. So, watching and reviewing movies is often a great way for students to see how setting, color, lighting, and composition communicate to tell a story or evoke emotion in order to write more visually compelling scripts.
Evaluative criticism is an important part of film reviewing. Studying reviews that are critical as well as positive of a film will help students understand what works and what doesn’t in storytelling. This will give them a valuable perspective when they revise their screenplays and will teach them to be open to critique and to think in analytical terms about their own work.
Writing reviews for diverse film genres will help students understand and appreciate the different tactics available to storytellers, from writing different kinds of characters to varying narrative structures to different approaches to themes. In turn, this will help students cultivate a broader, deeper toolkit to draw from when writing their own stories.
Once you’ve watched and rewatched dozens of films across a variety of genres, you’ll start to spot the tropes – the typical plot devices and themes that get used again and again and again. In order to be a good screenwriter, you need to know what these tropes are, not so you can use them but so that you can learn to subvert them instead. This is a good way to sharpen your own screenwriting skills as you think about how other writers have tackled these tropes and then try to figure out how you would do it differently. In the process of writing your reviews, you’ll become an expert at spotting the derivativeness in other people’s work, and that’s something you can then bring to your own screenplays.
By looking at how other films pace themselves, students can learn about how to control narrative tension in their own scripts and how to keep a reader turning pages all the way to the end. Reviews often refer to whether a film drags or rushes, and these pacing-related assessments can help us provide students with a practical conceptual framework by which to evaluate their own screenwriting.
Watching movies with an ear toward sound can be a great way to experience sound design, informing the mood and shaping the story. Film scholars-in-training can learn how background music, delivery of dialogue, and even silences are critical to the narrative.
Here’s a brief list of how sound impacts storytelling:
Emotion: Soundtracks and sound effects can elicit profound emotional responses, embellishing the emotional landscape of the story.
Atmospherics: The presence of background noises and ambient sounds can help ground the setting, creating a more immersive experience.
Pacing: Changes in sound tempo can alter the pace of the story, heightening suspense or punctuating the narrative with much-needed relief.
Character Development: When a specific sound or theme is associated with a particular character, viewers will become more familiar with and attached to that character.
Foreshadowing: Subtle sonic cues can foreshadow a transition in a story or a change in events and create multiple layers of anticipation.
Narrative Clarity: Sound can clarify plot points and transitions, moving the audience through the story with greater clarity.
Gaining an understanding of this layer of filmmaking can help a screenwriter better suggest sound in their scripts, which can be instrumental in crafting atmosphere and tone in a scene.
This is where it helps to teach students that writing a movie review is not about forming an opinion but rather about learning how to become a better screenwriter; every review is a lesson in crafting a better story, a richer character, and a more nuanced dialogue. Pop some corn and start critiquing: every movie watched and written about is an apprenticeship in the art of storytelling!