Screenwriting workshop

Simone Lipiarski

Teacher -English

Students from the Media Co-curricular Program, along with students interested in extended creative writing opportunities, visited ACMI in Federation Square in October for a Screenwriting Workshop. 

Aleks Marijan

Year 9

I had the wonderful opportunity in attending the Screenwriting Workshop at the Australian Centre for Moving Image (ACMI). It was a program for Year 7 -10 students to understand more about storytelling for a short film, as well as the process of making a short story. I was encouraged to attend by my English teacher – Ms Lipiarski - despite not being too passionate about screenwriting. I do love films, but I prefer talking about them, rather than creating an actual movie. My teacher encouraged me regardless, knowing that I love storytelling through creative writing and that I would be interested to pick up new skills with my writing.    

I am so glad that I chose to go because I picked up fundamental skills with writing, particularly around ways to develop story ideas from scratch, the structure of a film, and even pitching methods for stories. We delved into plotting and structuring stories, and the ideal plot with goals, stakes, obstacles, and milestones. We were told to ask questions and to look at images for story prompts, and this really helped in generating ideas.    We also explored ways to connect to characters through being realistic and having goals that the audience can hope they will achieve. We explored character 'diamonds', focusing on flaws, strengths, objectives and fears – especially [the character's] hopes at the beginning, in comparison to their goals at the end of the story.     

I was surprised that the things I learned applied to creative writing as well. I picked up so many new techniques and many new ideas were sparked. Whenever [the facilitators] would introduced a new method, we had to try it ourselves, and I would use a story idea I had had on my mind for months.  After this excursion, I had 5 pages worth of notes for my concept and I have now started to draft and begin the writing process of my creative story. Despite it not being a screenplay, the skills I picked up on the excursion to ACMI helped in the planning and idea generation process.    

After the presentation, we explored the museum which was so fascinating! We looked at different types of movie genres and styles, costumes, and the original types of technology used to create movies.   As someone who loves creative writing and telling a story through writing, I thoroughly enjoyed this amazing experience!