Week Four: Adaptation, Novel to Film

This week we will talk about the screenplay, screenplay form and this week's assignment which is to take any scene from the The Great Gatsby and adapt it for the screen in the form of a screenplay. Below is a graphic that shows the basic outline of screenplay form. There are a number of sites on the internet that will show you a similiar template.

If you want to try screenplay software, you can go to the celtx site and download the free version of their scriptwriting and production software.
https://www.celtx.com/desktop.html

 This software will allow you to save your screenplay as a text file or a PDF which you can link to your blog. Please publish your screenplay to your blog before class. I look forward to reading your screenplays.

Week Two: Miss Peregrine's Home for Unusual Children

The reading for this week is the recent novel designed for young adults entitled, Miss Peregrine's Home for Unusual Children. The author, Ransom Riggs, attended Pine View High School in Sarasota County and the early parts of the novel unfold in the landscape of South Sarasota County. Besides the local landscape, the novel has another interest especially relevant to Ringling students and that is the way in which the novel has been written in response to found photographs which are, in turn, incorporated as illustrations in the book. Please read the book before coming to class and we will discuss various comparisons to this work and the Wizard of Oz and the fairy story in general, including such trans-media narratives as the Harry Potter books.

Writing Assignment: Write your own short story from one of the sets of pictures you will find on the course resource page. The sets of photographs have been especially selected for this purpose. There are several sets to choose from, select just one set to create your story. You do not have to use all the pictures in the set, use as many as you feel like. For convenience they have been mounted in the form of a pdf document but you do not have to use them in the order in which they appear. The captions on the photos are there only to identify their source, you should ignore them in writing your story unless you specifically want to use them.

Required Movie: Watch the Hunger Games dir. Gary Ross. We will discuss this movie and the boom in young adult transmedia narrative in class.