Screenwriting: an Entirely New Challenge

Early in the fall, when I went with a group of friends to the Arts Involvement Fair, I’ll be honest: I was only going to support my friends and had absolutely no expectation of finding something with which to get involved.  I have no artistic of musical talent whatsoever (unless you count my singing voice having been described as “surprising” and “passable” as talent) and my only on-stage experience has come in the form of one semester of drama class in high school and playing the small role of the cat and the fiddle in my second grade production of Lemonade.  However, at the small little fair in the basement of the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Mad Royal Film Society caught my eye.  I knew one of the leaders of the club from another club with which I was involved, and I thought Hey! I like movies; maybe this could be cool.

I went to their first meeting and found out that every semester they make their own short film as a club.  This sounded fascinating to me and so I joined the screenwriting small group.  I had taken creative writing classes in the past and worked on my school’s high school newspaper and have always been an avid writer, but I had absolutely no idea how to screen write, let alone how to do so collaboratively as a large group.

We started just with brainstorming ideas for the plot and characters and setting and slowly but surely our film started to take shape.  Once we had a rough outline in place, we took to devising the dialogue and stage directions.  We eventually also needed to edit our script in accordance with the suggestions and input of the set design and cinematography / story-boarding groups.  It was a great learning experience for me, and we are set to finally do our filming this upcoming weekend.

Though I am not sure whether film is something I want to pursue as a career, I had never even considered it before.  After this experience, what I’ve realized is that creativity and writing can take so many more forms than just journalism or newspaper work; I think that as I continue with this club, skills like editing and working in a group on something as big as a short film or planning a film festival can help me whether I work in film or in something else entirely.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *