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| From Creativescreenwriting.com - By Webmaster - 2006-04-4 Breaking the Story is an exercise in breaking a single episode of a one-hour drama, with active audience participation. Armed with a white board and marker, Tim Minear guides the class through teaser and act breaks of an episode of the long-running WB hit television show, Angel. Students lob ideas toward the podium, and the best are rewarded with a place of honor on the whiteboard, where the episode takes shape over the next two hours. Minear listens carefully to every pitch, explaining why some ideas w**k, and why some will never make it to the board. He steers the group through a process that many professional writers find difficult: creating a story from scratch that services the characters, stays true to a theme, and how to survive getting an idea shot down in a room full of your peers with your ego in tact. Minear keeps the audience laughing with war stories from his own experiences in writers’ rooms, and follows the exercise with a Q&A session in which he explains how he wrote the spec that landed him a job on The X-Files along with his suggestions for writing a very dark I Love Lucy spec. Part of the Screenwriting Expo DVD Series, this 90-minute masters course is an exceptional value. Don’t miss this opportunity to learn from the finest faculty teaching screenwriting today. $19.95 TIM MINEAR is a professional television writer/producer. Everything he’s ever done has been cancelled. Often quickly. His credits include writing staff positions on Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman and The X-Files, and executive producer/showrunner on Angel, Firefly, Wonderfalls, and The Inside. |