Dupult skeið: ‘Writing the thriller film’ og ‘Genre Storytelling’

Fyrst í mai hava vit tveir dagar, har kendi filmshøvundurin Stephen Cleary gevur ítøkilig og hent amboð í at arbeiða við genrufilmum. Fyrra skeiðið er um at skriva spenningsfilm (thriller) og seinna skeiðið er um genrur. Skeiðini eru hugsað sum ein eind, men kunnu eisini takast hvør sær. Niðanfyri eru gjølligari lýsingar av skeiðunum – á enskum, sum eisini verður undirvísingarmálið.

• Nær: 6. og 7 mai 2023
• Hvar: Fimshúsið
• Hvør: Stephen Cleary
• fyri hvønn: All sum hava áhuga í at læra at skriva Thriller film
• Kostnaður: 275,- fyri annan dagin ella 450,- fyri báðar (skriva í viðmerking, um tú bert teknar teg til annan dagin)

Dagur 1, Writing the thriller film

Of all cinema story genres the Thriller is the only one that never goes out of fashion. Romances come and go, Horror rises and falls, musicals come with a great splash and then fade away for a few years. But the Thriller is always there, always has an audience.

For lots of reasons: it includes a great range of stories, from the Agatha Christie-style investigator whodunnit, through the gangster and crime story out into the wilds of the sane/insane protagonists of the psychological thriller. 

Also, the Thriller is the only story genre to specialise in challenging the audience to get to the end of the plot, identify the killer, the trickster, the meaning of the story BEFORE the main characters of the story. The Thriller is unique in the way it constantly plays a game, writer versus the audience, played out in the world of the story. Which means the structural principles of Thriller screenwriting are unlike any other. 

In this one-day workshop we will take a deep dive into the secrets of the cinema thriller: thriller structures, thriller characters, and the more subtle writing techniques that will make your thriller writing compulsive.

Including: 

The indestructible genre: 10 reasons why the Thriller will never die.

Understanding Thriller Structures

The Suspense Thriller

The Investigative Thriller: 

The Crime Thriller

The Gangster Thriller

The Heist Thriller

Character in Thrillers

Film Noir and the evolution of thriller characters

The effect of struggling for truth on character

The emotional relationship between thriller characters and the audience

Balancing character and plot complexity

Thrillers and the Audience

Narrative point-of-view in Thriller writing

Creating claustrophobia and paranoia

Thriller Tones

Conclusion: Ten things to remember about developing Thrillers

Dagur 2, Genre storytelling

This workshop is a practical guide to writing and developing genre stories. It describes all the standard generic story structures, explores the natural generic character types, and gives you a straightforward way of understanding and predicting what happens when you combine different genres within one story. It also describes the fundamental structural pattern underlying most stories of any genre. 

Including: 

Genre, the Universe and Everything: A quick historical tour including:

• Getting medieval on your ass: Knights, princesses and the birth of Romance.
• Absinthe makes the detective stronger: the druggy birth of the Private Eye.
• Succubus, incubus, God help us: sex, blood and Gothic horror.
• The bottle-blond joker: the dark roots of comedy.
• Existentially isolated? Moi?: Psychological thrills in an industrial society.

Genre Plotting: Basic ingredients

                             The Genre Set Piece

Generic Characters

• Victims
• Guides
• Love Interests
• Killers
• Complimentary Pairs
• Savants and Children
• Characters who lead the action
• Characters who follow the action

All your Genre Elements – Your 8-point checklist of the essential genre elements in your story

Conclusions

• 10 things to know about genre screen storytelling.
• 10 things to avoid in genre screen storytelling.