Activities

• Read "Ex Machina" in sections
• Analyze the screenplay in 4 major chunks: Act I, Act II - part 1, Act II - part 2, and Act III
• Focus on the major story beats: Ordinary World, Inciting Incident, Refusing the Call, New World, Midpoint, Low-point, Climax and Denouement

• Begin the pre-writing phase of the students' own original work with the brainstorming of ideas, then descend into articulating those ideas through iterations and peer review in the areas of:
• The Hook
• The Logline
• The One Page (Pitch)
• The Structural Outline

Draft #1: "Sketch"

• Based on the student's Structural Outline, a first stab at laying out the scenes that get us between the major movements of the story and the tactics for developing the main characters and their subsequent arcs.
• Peer Review of each writer's scripts in class with thorough notes given, wherein notes must be recorded and implemented by writer

Draft #2: "Story"

• An overhauled version of the first draft that focuses entirely on the story, plot and structural aspects of the script. This will involve reordering scenes, adding and subtracting scenes, and abbreviating or expanding existing scenes to emphasize the most important concepts in your screenplay.

Draft #3: "Character"

• An overhauled version of the first draft that focuses entirely on character, characterization, character development and character arcs.

Draft #4: "Dialogue"

• An overhauled version of the first draft that focuses entirely on dialogue, its fluency, efficiency, naturalism, quality, clarity and differentiation of character voices.

Draft #5: "Theme"

• An overhauled version of the first draft that focuses entirely on the underlying conceptual aspects of your story, its world and its purpose.

Feature Film: Act I - Draft 1

• Using the short film as a reference, writers will build out their stories into feature film level complexity just for the 1st Act of the screenplay, The Set Up. This will cover the major structural beats of: The Ordinary World, The Big Event/Inciting Incident, Refusing the Call to Action, and the Push into the 2nd Act.

Feature Film: Act I - Draft 2

• A significant revision to the first draft of the 1st Act of the feature film script that will focus on Story, Character, Dialogue and Theme.
• If additional time is needed in Copernimester 4 to cover all 4 of the focused drafts of the short film, both drafts of the feature film 1st Act will likely need to be condensed into Copernimester 6.*