Youth workshop at Toronto Public Library
Last Saturday May 31, 16 kids aged 12-14 took me up on my offer to try to teach them something about screenwriting. I called the workshop, “Writing the 1 minute movie” but I found the kids able to do far more than that.
So I took a chance and introduced them to some of the basic concepts and principles of story and screenwriting. We started as I often do in workshops with adults, by asking what our favourite movies were about. Often when I ask college students or adults this question, I get very convoluted, intellectual, and ultimately not very clear answers. Sometimes I get an attempt to describe the entire plot of the movie. But these sixth graders were able to answer the question quite clearly and ultimately discovered the basic structure of a story:
A character performs an action to achieve a goal against an adversary.
With adult students, I usually refine this statement:
A motivated character struggling to perform an action to achieve a life and death goal against a worthy adversary.
But it’s essentially the same. Once the kids understood this basic concept, they could then go on to make up their own stories. In fact, if all they took away from the workshop was this, I’d be happy.
I often shorten this statement to CAGA, (character/action/goal/adversary.)
After working this basic principle out, I showed the kids one of my films for children, Mela’s Lunch, a short I wrote and directed for the NFB. They got to test my principle against the story they saw on screen.
Next we played a game of coming up with a character–without really trying to think about it–and a setting. After dividing the kids into groups of 4, I instructed them to pick a character and a setting. We got a cat in a church, a spy in the ocean, a scuba diver in Antarctica and a hitman on Mars. Fantastic tests for CAGA!
So now the kids had to come up with goals and adversaries and wouldn’t you know it, they did! The Martian hitman wanted to join the Martian mafia, but would have to kill a number of victims on earth–only to fall in love with one of them! The cat had to catch the murderer of his owner–despite being a cat. The scuba diver had to test his equipment in the frigid waters while fending off a killer seal. And the spy had to beat the real James Bond to find Atlantis.
What incredible creativity! And what a terrific way of discovering the basic principles of story! I don’t know if the kids had fun, but I sure enjoyed watching them work.
We then worked on two of the most important story beats of their potential scripts: the opening Hook and the Climax–some important components for any working screenwriter.
At the end of the 3 hour session, we went to the computer learning center of the library and the young writers wrote up the first page of their screenplays, the beginning of their hook.
It was a dense morning and I just want to express my admiration for the kids for plugging away at some difficult concepts for any screenwriter to grasp. I know it wasn’t necessarily easy for them, but I hope it was enlightening.
Good luck to them all and I hope they go on to write a script of their own. I’d love to read them!
One thought on “Youth workshop at Toronto Public Library”
Hi Sugith!
I’m glad the youth workshop went well. I was wondering if you could talk about raising the stakes in a film, and speak about how to create momentum (if our writing and pacing is dragging).