Director and screenwriter, Paula Goldberg, meets with students at LitFest. Not only did she give many helpful tips for screenwriting, but also talked about life skills. Goldberg’s speech both inspired and encouraged students to get involved with writing.
Goldberg started by emphasizing the importance of the question “Why?”. She explained how in screenwriting and in life it is important to be curious. In screenwriting curiosity can help you create more complex characters and create more detailed stories and in life curiosity can help you learn more and get you more opportunities.
Goldberg also explained the difference between screenwriting and regular writing. In screenwriting you have to write a script with the intention that it isn’t supposed to be read. This means while screenwriting you have to think about giving more visual clues, showing things about characters through character actions, and think about how you can use dialogue.
Goldberg demonstrated how dialogue is sometimes unnecessary and you can use visual clues and music to explain something. Students watched a video of a clip from the movie “UP” that had no dialogue. She then asked us what inferences we could make off of it. The clip was used to represent when making a script you can’t rely on dialogue because that would make it unnatural. Instead, screenwriters have to find a way to decrease the use of dialogue and let visual clues and music tell the story.
One thing I really enjoyed about Goldberg’s speech was how she made it very hands-on. Students were able to act out different scripts to further explore the role of dialogue. One of the scripts said everything straight up and left no room for the audience to infer what would happen. In the other script there were less things said straight up and more inferences made. Students agreed that the second script was better because the script left more room for inferences to be made.
Overall, students learned about the importance of curiosity in life and in screenwriting and also taught about how dialogue is sometimes unnecessary and visual clues/music are sometimes much more effective in creating a good script. Her speech was hands-on and made screenwriting fun. Goldberg’s talk encouraged students to try screenwriting and gave students a better understanding of what screen writing is.
