Screenwriting

Film Co-op Training and Development - PAST

(Intermediate - Theory and Hands-On)
March 15, Sat, 11am - 5pm
Instructor: Gretchen Kelbaugh
Location: New Brunswick Film Co-op
(732 Charlotte Street, Fredericton)
Charlotte Street Arts Centre
Fee: $20 For NBFC Members/
$30 For Non-Members


(Film Co-op Members are required to take at least one screenwriting course before they direct/produce their own projects through the Film Co-op)

Class Limit: 8

This course is for people who already know or who will learn in advance proper script formatting and understand the basic 3-act structure.

Pre-requisite
- bring a synopsis (one page or less) for a movie idea (short or feature) which you haven't shot yet

Topics:
- To tell or not to tell (will anyone but Mom care?)
- finding the heart of your story
- creating conflict, great characters and comedy
- giving and taking criticism, using your synopses
- case studies of great and lousy scenes

INSTRUCTOR'S BIOGRAPHY

Gretchen Kelbaugh twice won the Atlantic Film Festival – CBC Script Development award. One of these, 106 Fire Hydrants, was produced for national CBC-TV in 1999.

Since 2000, Gretchen has written, produced and directed both shorts and documentaries, many of which have screened in the Atlantic Film Festival and some beyond.

Gretchen’s first feature, Margaret and Deirdre, screened at the Atlantic Film Festival and was featured at the New Brunswick Gala Screening of the Silver Wave Film Festival, 2005. The screenplay, which she wrote, won the national CBC Producers’ Showcase in 1999. Margaret and Deirdre has been nominated for three awards at the Trail Dance Film Festival in Oklahoma, January 2008: Best Feature Drama, Best Foreign Film and Best Screenplay.

80/20; The Developing World (2006), is distributed in Canada by the Canadian Learning Co. Gretchen and Connell Smith produced the 2-hour series, which won the Excellence in Music award for documentaries at the Silver Wave Film Festival in 2006.

Gretchen’s short, Piece o’ Cake, screened at festivals in New Brunswick plus the DeReel Film Festival in Melbourne and the Broad Humor Film Festival in Venice, CA, where it won Best No Budget Short. Both Piece o’ Cake and Gretchen’s first doc, Story of Three, have just been accepted into the “Downloads” initiative of CBC-television, Atlantic.