Screenwriting: A Manual

by Jonathan Dawson

Covering all forms of screenwriting, this is a wide-ranging and accessbile guide to industry practices and principles. While providing a comprehensive and considered approach to presenting work, it allows for a great deal of creative freedom. With script extracts, original storyboards, and narrative ideas for multimedia, the book offers concrete examples of successful and expressive screenwriting within the described production formats. It also contains...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195508327
• ISBN13: 9780195508321
• Release Date: September 2000
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.4" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

At last! A screenwriting book that's honest...

This book proves that Aussies aren't just eccentrics who make quirkylittle films about ballroom dancing or killing crocodiles. This wonderfully sane and practical handbook assumes that any young writer will be prepared to, indeed want to, work in ALL of the fields of writing for the screen - not just features or hot television series.In other words, the writer doesn't pretend that there's a direct pipeline or a magic formula to going from Nintendo to Hollywood screenplay in one jump. This book covers all the likely places you're going to have to work in - from educational video, ads, sitcoms, and so on but more importantly new media. There's a terrific chapter on multimedia scripting which doesn't appear to be covered by any other current manual and a unique chapter on animation with some quite extraordinary storyboards.To be honest, this book is a bit of a surprise. This book is a great antidote to all those books and film manuals - let alone courses - that insist on formulas like the hero's journey, character arcs and so on to the exclusion of the kind of originality and excitement that produces movies like "Being John Malkovich" which, thank heavens, obey no such rules!