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Despite increasing efforts for ‘greener’ screen production practices and screen poetics, the nonhuman continues to be excluded in screen narratives that predominantly revolve around the human protagonist and anthropocentric world views. Arguing that inclusion is not a matter of representations on the screen but of letting others tell, this research explores diversity as more-than(-human) matter to ask how the utterances of more-than(-human) storytellers can be invited into story development and the writing of the screenplay text. By offering the screenplay page as the common ground that invites others into its storytelling, I draw from the ‘wandering’ of my creative practice to explore how different relational, experiential and textual markers provide the semiotic pathways that indicate or limit another's telling respectively. The result is a shift from representation, as a storytelling about, towards the narrative positionings of a storytelling together with in the form of polyphonic assemblage. Diversity emerges as a screenwriting beyond conceptions of voice, language and my screenwriting self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In early 2023, as the release of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT became more widespread, concerns arose in the higher education sector regarding how students might use generative AI (gen-AI), not only for writing critical essays, but for producing creative works. Multiple gen-AI tools appeared specifically targeting the application to writing screenplays. This prompted the question: what are the ethical and pedagogical implications of integrating gen-AI within the context of teaching and learning screenwriting within the academy? The research design for this project applied a practice-based approach to script development, embedding critical reflection on the iterative process of engaging with gen-AI to write a short screenplay. The gen-AI was also prompted to self-critique the story it generated. The research identified ethical concerns regarding equitable access to technology, the potential for bias and theft of works used to train the AI. The study also found that engaging with gen-AI privileged analytical thinking over emotional engagement with the creative process. The findings suggest that creative confidence and an awareness of one’s own creative process are critical to effectively engage with gen-AI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Written by a teacher and two students in an undergraduate course titled Housing: Planning and Policy, this commentary explores screenwriting as a pedagogical device used in service of experiential learning about the city in the classroom. It reflects on the employment of this device over two semesters wherein ethnographic vignettes were drawn upon to iteratively craft scripts, with fictional interventions guided by critical frames derived from the learning objectives of the course. We highlight the usefulness of screenwriting as a tool to embrace the urban as a becoming-space in the classroom, wherein students: 1) freely express their encounters with the built environment and feed them into the process of learning by doing; 2) immerse themselves in the ongoing city politics outside the classroom; and 3) appreciate the entangled realms of policy, governance, markets, bureaucracy, and media. Our experiments with screenwriting have been inspired by anthropological research that has brought out the multiplicity and perpetual becoming of urban political spaces. We articulate here our arrival at the screenwriting exercise and point to its potential for teaching and learning the city in anti-positivist ways.

Some Kind of Liberating Effect is a documentary dedicated to research freedom in the academic study of religion in Central and Eastern Europe. This essay examines the techniques used to develop a script and a screenplay. It will show how the documentary integrates screenwriting with the question of freedom of research in this academic field and region. First, the essay presents the raw footage filmed between 2022 and 2023, then the screenwriting techniques used for plotting a story. Finally, it discusses the shift from the history of the academic field to storytelling, particularly with regard to the frame story included in the film. In conclusion, it presents some remarks concerning the interdisciplinary and intersectoral approaches between religious studies and the film industry implemented in the documentary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is it possible to document trauma? How should one approach the disaster zone where the subject is torn to pieces? What narrative resources does Mexican-Salvadoran director Tatiana Huezo utilize to map these pains in her documentaries El lugar más pequeño ('The Tiniest Place') (2011) and Tempestad ('Tempest') (2016) and in her fiction Noche de Fuego ('Prayers for the Stolen') (2021)? In developing my argument, I propose that Huezo employs a poetics of displacement in her approach to women who have experienced gender-based violence and forced disappearance of family members. Their suffering is explored through displacing their stories with respect to their bodies, sheltering their emotions in visual metaphors and letting their voices wander through the landscape. Her work assists me to explore Adam Ganz's notes (2010) on the relationship between writing for the screen and oral tradition, as well as Michel Chion's reflections (1999) on the effect that the displacement of voices has with respect to the body in cinema. It also helps me to inquire into the significance of spaces of trust in the construction of the 'idea for the screen' among participants who are not writers and, ultimately, to investigate the nature and the function of art in the context of violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This editorial introduces aspects of the processes of trauma, traumatic stress reactions and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), in relation to screenwriting and memory in different formats. It does this by explaining and offering an overview of how trauma is perceived currently in comparison to how trauma was originally conceived when it became medicalized. There is a comparison with how other mental unwellness is interpreted and we learn how film and screenwriting influences trauma in a multitude of ways. Examples are used from important films and television shows with the articles within this edition elucidated on. The significance of suffering in storytelling and screenwriting is dissected and its relationship with mental health. The problems with diagnosis are examined, plus the complexities concerning writing as healing. Issues with collective and social trauma are explored in relation to articles on Mexico and Taiwan. The new concept and process of 'recovered reality' is introduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the use of artificial intelligence in the creation of audiovisual scripts. The goal of the research was to analyze how AI can generate stories and characters, as well as create conflict situations within the script. Traditional screenwriting tools are replaced by generative AI models, which were used for script development in the practical part of the study. The results showed that AI is effective at creating the basic structure of a story and characters, but still requires human intervention when crafting more complex dialogues and emotional layers. This research contributes to the understanding of the potential and limitations of AI in the creative process of scriptwriting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay I will deal with the topic of religious miniseries for Television, that will be seen especially from the point of view of their dramatic structure. A genre that has been -and still is- extremely successful in Italy in this new century, it has had also some other products which have been a failure, at least in terms of audience. I will argue that, although many times audiences have shown to appreciate religious content, this content has to be created with a dramatic structure that conveys conflicts and emotions. I will shortly describe different dramatic models that are used, and their different outcome in terms of engagement of the audience.

As with many popular texts promising templates for successful storytelling, The Writer's Journey claims that a singular story structure applies to all voices and circumstances, therefore funnelling every character journey into a 'universal neutral'. This article offers queer temporality as a lens through which to unravel the 12 steps of Vogler's hero's journey, informed by queer theory's critiques of the 8 steps of the heteronormative life journey. It joins other studies critiquing the paradigm from other standpoints, including Indigenous screen storytelling, gaming and interactive narratives, and for development of characters disenfranchised by gender and/or circumstance. Others note the model's increasing irrelevance as writers uncover its limitations for creative processes of story development. This article homes in on how studies of queer temporalities – rejecting 'dominant temporal logics' and 'chrononormativity', replacing 'straight time' with 'queer time', can further destabilise the hero's journey's dominance in story development by exploring the breadth of practices in creative writing and screen production beyond the universalising models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparing the novel In Custody, written by Anita Desai (1984), and the film adaptation In Custody (1993), directed by Ismail Merchant, provides an interesting opportunity to examine how literary texts are transformed into audio-visual works, through different discursive techniques. A written text is taken from the page to live on a screen, and thus focusing on the main content the literary author created becomes a challenge for screenwriters, filmmakers and translators. In the case of In Custody, the inclusion of English subtitles in the film allows for its internationalization while respecting the language of the novel. This approach enables audiences to appreciate the sounds of Hindi and Urdu poetry, and in doing so, they become custodians of these rich literary traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an overview of a Critical Race Feminista praxis-oriented methodological framework in development called FilmCrit, and a critical race method expanded into filmic form called Cinematic Critical Race Counterstorytelling. Critical Race Feminisita Praxis informs this work by drawing on a Critical Race Theory in Education framework and Chicana Feminist theories and epistemologies. In discussing two FilmCrit studies, a qualitative documentary study, No Somos Famosos (We Are Not Famous), and my dissertation study, From the Classroom to the Screen: Experiences of Women of Color MFA Film Students, I detail the theoretical, methodological, and analytical development, as well as the scholarly significance, of FilmCrit and (auto)biographical and composite Cinematic Critical Race Counterstorytelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The generation and transformation of screen narrative characteristics are closely related to the formation and development of screen writing. Screenwriting is a product of the combination of screen media and human narrative needs. It was structured and generated in the birth of film art, and expanded and refined in the development and narrative transformation of television screens and mobile phone microscreens. The generation and transformation of screen narrative characteristics constitute a narrative compensation path. It reflects the standardization and shaping of narrative forms by screen media, supplements the function of screen narrative, and also records the process of human subjects from using screen stories for communication to replacing screen stories as narrative subjects in the process of controlling media technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I explore the role of screenwriters and dialogue writers within the more extensive filmmaking process of New Bollywood. Drawing on ethnographic data, I foreground the creative tools, research and negotiations that prompt screenwriters to conceptualise and pitch character arcs that feature disability while positioning the writer as central to diversify film genres. By building on scholarship on production cultures, scripting and disability studies, I draw upon factors that navigate the writer's gaze from non-hereditary filmmaking networks to foreground disabilities in scripts and character arcs in efforts to strategise that they do not classify as reductive pathologisations and supercripping cultures. This article pays close attention to the conditions, identity politics, biases and situated vulnerabilities of writers that shape the assemblages of scripting disability rhetorics. The data from semi-structured interviews, with an explicit focus on three films and their script ideation and production pedagogies, illustrate these interlinkages and insights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, taking its cue from Charles Drazin's pioneering work, is the first extended analysis of the career of British screenwriter Angus MacPhail, described as one of the key figures who helped to lay the groundwork for the golden age of British cinema. MacPhail worked as scenario editor for producer Michael Balcon at the leading British studios Gainsborough, Gaumont-British and Ealing from the late 1920s to the late 1940s. The article considers MacPhail's work in relation to debates about authorship, collaboration and celebrity culture during this period. It explores his intellectual and cultural formation as a Cambridge undergraduate who studied for the newly established English Tripos during the early 1920s; and highlights MacPhail's ambivalent relationship to modernism, through his opposition to Virginia Woolf's reconfiguration of literary values during the 1920s, and his penchant for what Leonard Diepeveen has described as 'mock modernism'. It goes on to analyse the circumscribed power and influence MacPhail exercised within the British studio system during the late 1920s to the late 1940s, before considering his career in relation to other key figures of this period such as Ivor Montagu and Elliot Stannard, and his relationship to British middlebrow culture. Finally, it explores how MacPhail's specialised, circumscribed focus on film writing set him apart from what Alexis Weedon describes as a new type of author-celebrity during this period, the emergent 'transmedia storyteller'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This interview with writer–producer Shu Kei provides an oral history of Hong Kong drama Tracey (2018), the directorial debut of rising talent Jun Li. An integral player in every aspect of Tracey's production, Shu Kei recounts the film's inception, preparatory phase, shooting, editing, release and reception. He chronicles the vicissitudes of working with a new generation of actors and a first-time director. His account of Tracey's production sheds light on Hong Kong filmmaking practice in general, revealing how methods of script construction and shot design operate in contemporary Hong Kong cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on interviews from industry professionals, this article explores both the collaborative and, less documented, individual manifestations of script development. Researchers have noted that within screenwriting and screen production, script development practices and processes defy definition over various modes, media, global contexts and production cultures. This article argues that part of this flux is the ways in which individual pursuits of script development are mis/understood and/or dismissed. Screenwriting scholarship often questions the discourses within which individual pursuits of script development are promoted, especially the 'how-to' market of screenwriting manuals, using the 'practical realities' of the screen industry as a basis for this critique. This article builds on this work to problematise script development as a solely collaborative pursuit. Those interviewed for the research occupy a breadth of script development roles across their respective countries and industries, including screenwriter, script consultant and script editor. While the how-to market often neglects the practical realities of script development by reducing it to the individual pursuit from idea to draft, it is not simply the case that the industrial perspective is always collaborative either, as these professionals reveal. This article investigates the relationship that exists between collaborative practices and the contributions of the individual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1920s screenwriting duo Anita Loos and John Emerson wrote two how-to guides that offered advice for launching a Hollywood career, How to Write Photoplays (1921) and Breaking into the Movies (1922). Rather than emphasizing genius, the guides focus on Hollywood as an egalitarian workplace where writers become professionals through training and experience. This article argues that the guides thus functioned to distinguish Loos as a professional writer, a strategic identity opposed to both the male modernist genius and the female typist. Contra readings of Loos as ambivalent to professionalism that have been based on Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925), by focusing on her screenwriting career, this article argues that Loos deployed an identity as a professional writer to avoid being pigeonholed by gendered ideas about writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a close relationship between pulp fiction and film noir. The link is the adapted screenplay. While there has been extensive critical work on film noir for almost 70 years there has not been an equally intense scrutiny of the process of adaptation and its product, the adapted screenplay. This article offers a critical discussion of the complex literary-cinematic ecology of the noir adaptation/screenwriting process for The Maltese Falcon and the role of fidelity in the adaptation as a key ingredient of the film's success. The methodology involves examining the various factors, methods and players involved in the creation of the screenplay with an emphasis on a comparative study of the literary text and its screenplay. The article concludes that fidelity in adaptation was central to the film's appeal and that the film's success raised the profile of the novel. The level of screenwriting talent, the nature of the relationship between the screenwriter and the director and the depth of cultural resonance found in the original literary text were vital influences on the adaptation process and the resulting film. These factors turned The Maltese Falcon screenplay into a standard for future pulp to noir adaptations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Knockout, a crime television drama, emerged during the Spring Festival holiday of 2023 and quickly sparked a wide discussion both online and offline. Different from previous shows of the same genre, it adopts a three-timeline narrative structure and abandons stereotypical characterization. The heroes are made of flesh and blood and the villains are not born to be evil and cruel. Their choices and the consequences echo the changes in Chinese society over the past twenty years. This article features our interview with the screenwriter Zhu Junyi and, from the perspective of sociocultural contexts, briefly analyses why The Knockout became a phenomenal hit, revealing changes in the screenwriting trend of main melody works. The interview consists of three parts, covering the ecology for screenwriters in China, the birth of The Knockout and Zhu's characterization of the television drama script. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The review explores the translation and significance of Steven Maras's Screenwriting: History, Theory, and Practice into Romanian, emphasizing its relevance within the global academic and filmmaking landscape. Maras's theoretical approach, influenced by Foucault and cultural studies, offers insights applicable beyond Hollywood, including to Romanian filmmaking practices. Despite differences between Hollywood and Romanian cinema, Maras's work prompts critical reflection on power dynamics, institutional influences, and the visibility of screenwriters. It aids teaching by focusing it towards understanding screenwriting as a blueprint for production, highlighting the industrial dimensions of the craft. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the academic domain focused on the artistic practice of screenwriting, this exploratory study assesses the presence of emotional transportation and character identification processes within the solitary screenwriter's creative imagination during the writing process. Screen-writing research is facing a dichotomy of the screenwriter who embodies both the role of a narrative specialist and that of a visual storytelling poet. Screenwriters often work in isolation, even in collaborative projects, leading to a tension between solitary work and collaborative roles. Narrative theories in screenwriting have mainly centered on identification of the audience, neglecting the screenwriter's perspective. However, screenwriting can serve as a platform for experimentation and a reflection of new ideas, insights, and hands-on experience, meeting the demand for a systematic understanding of the writer's processes. The results of this study provide preliminary insights into the mechanisms of emotional transportation, identification, and eureka moments in screenwriting practice. The study suggests that the transportation effect in writers is induced by a feeling of security, which arises from the limitations of the assignment. The data also suggests that pressure can lead to more original dramaturgical solutions. As such, this experimental pilot study already sheds light on the screenwriter's artistic process. Yet, it has limitations, including a small number of informants and the novelty of the research method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review article examines research into the conceptualization and development of narrative-based virtual reality (VR) experiences with the aim of articulating the overlaps and differences in various disciplinary approaches. The terms 'conceptualization' and 'development' are used to encompass a range of activities (represented by terms such as 'screenwriting', 'design', 'narrative design' and 'prototyping') that might be associated with VR development by researchers from fields of screenwriting and broader screen studies, game studies, interactive digital narrative (IDN) and human–computer-interaction (HCI) fields. The focus of the article is research produced within the last decade, this coinciding with the resurgence of narrative-based VR production driven by affordable, consumer-grade technologies that emerged around 2015. While narrative-based VR is not new, recent technological advancements have enabled greater degrees of realism and an affordable consumer price point, making VR more appealing as an entertainment medium. This has led to an explosion of interest in narrative-based VR experiences in film festivals and conferences, with academic scholarship seeking to understand new practices and tools for creating storytelling experiences with the medium. Through an extensive survey of recent literature, this article seeks to answer the question of how we as researchers can conceive of VR conceptualization and development going forward. The analysis highlights the use of differing terminology across disciplines, which is often linked to understandings of adjacent or earlier media, processes and narrative models explored in these fields. Going forward, the article argues for an interdisciplinary research lens that foregrounds the embodied nature of VR storytelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last decade developments in virtual reality (VR) technologies have given rise to a new wave of immersive storytelling experiences that have captivated audiences at film festivals, in galleries, through online platforms and various other venues. In response, scholarly research into narrative-based VR has sought to understand the affordances, artistic qualities and immersive nature of this medium. Within this array of analysis and reflection, traditional screenwriting concerns such as narrative structure, plot devices and character development have been discussed alongside notions of immersion, embodiment and user experience design. Accordingly, notions of 'script development' have expanded to encompass processes gathered under terms like 'conceptualization', 'prototyping' and 'narrative design', which assume specific connotations in relation to various disciplinary approaches. This Special Issue explores the technologies, practices and paradigms that VR storytelling implements, with particular attention given to the differing terminology across disciplines that resonates, repurposes or redefines conceptual understandings belonging to earlier media, and specifically, to screenwriting for film. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While virtual reality technologies have been developing since the 1960s in North America, they became broadly accessible for the public in 2016, with the launch of affordable virtual reality headsets in the global market. Amongst recent virtual reality works, 360-degree films are particularly popular. With this article, I study the evolution of writing for 360-degree films from 2016 to 2020 through the analysis of the 360-degree documentary series Abitibi360 created by Canadian filmmaker Serge Bordeleau, of which Season 1 was produced in 2017 and Season 2 followed in 2020. My goal is to determine how his writing processes changed over this time period and to highlight the various factors that influenced this change. To conduct this research, I present an analysis of creative documents produced by Bordeleau for the two seasons. This work will demonstrate how the author evolved to use virtual reality technologies to develop his own language, even though he continued to be influenced by his original medium: cinematographic documentary films. Bordeleau became more creative as he mastered the techniques of virtual reality production. In particular, he learned to guide the viewer's attention to chosen points of interest within the 360-degree image by using several techniques, such as light, movement, colour and noise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sapa Ndisist Oh is the first film made by the people of Kepunduhan Village, Kramat Subdistrict, Tegal Regency, Central Java Province, with filmmaker Marjo Klengkam Sulam as the director. The film received appreciation from the Village Innovation Exchange at the Central Java Provincial Level, organized by the Ministry of Villages, Development of Disadvantaged Regions and Transmigration. Kepunduhan villagers were involved in the making of the film as crew and actors, collaborative work between professionals and the involvement of residents in the filmmaking process industry is a practice of Participation methods. Residents who are unfamiliar with filmmaking techniques are involved in filmmaking directly. Based on this, the research conducted aims to find out the role and form of participation of the Kepunduhan Village community in the process of making the film Sapa Ndisit Oh. The method used is descriptive. The process carried out by researchers is an interview with the director of the film Sapa Ndisit Oh and observation of the film Sapa Ndisit Oh as the object of research. Data analysis techniques in this study go through several stages, data collection, data reduction, data analysis, and conclusions. The results of the research obtained are the initial idea of filmmaking, the role of the Kepunduhan Village Community, and the form of Kepunduhan Village Community Participation in making the film Sapa Ndisit Oh. Participation practices produce films that are more relevant to the context of local communities, which are the result of discussions and interviews with the community. Participation practices can produce films that are more relevant to the context of the local community. The results of the research can be an additional knowledge for academics and professionals in the field of cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]