APRIL 15, 2011
Writers Network Helps Budding Screenwriters By Kulsoom Khan STATE COLLEGE – The members of the Nittany Valley Writers Network learned all about writing for screenplays at their monthly meeting thanks to guest speaker, Dr. Lyn Elliot. Elliot teaches screenwriting and film and video production at Penn State. She received her B.A. in English from Carlton College and she attended the University of Ohio for her Ph.D. Elliot started off by saying that her interest in fiction writing led her to filmmaking. “Screenplays are an unusual form of writing, because you can read a screenplay on its own and feel like you experience the story.” She also described them as a blueprint for a film. She said that it has to be “specific enough to spark the reader’s imagination” like a potential director who could read it and picture making a movie about it. According to Elliot, the biggest way that screenwriting is different from fiction is that’s it’s a story that has to be told through sound and images on a screen – so the job of the screenwriter is to describe what is seen and heard on screen. “It’s important to keep in mind as a screen writer that all a film can do is show is things and make us hear things,” she said, Therefore, the screenwriter cannot explain what a character is thinking or feeling, which makes the task a little bit more challenging.
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Dr. Lyn Elliot gives discusses the art of screenplay writing at the Nittany Valley Writers Network meeting. Elliot teaches film and video production and screenwriting at Penn State. Elliot went on to show the audience members examples of some scripts from movies such as Shawshank Redemption and Almost Famous. A tip she offered about writing for film is to get the idea across effectively and with brevity. “No one wants to see a film that drags and drags,” she said. The same idea goes for when writing dialogue for characters-brevity and compression. Who knows? Maybe now State College could have a potential Oscarwinning screenplay writer in its midst !
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