Daily Blog: Sarah Haag

Today in class, Mr. Rivers went over the podcast post mentioning that he forgot to put a place to post the podcast and pre-production page. After this students proceeded to post it, but have until midnight tonight. Mr. Rivers then went on to go over the lesson. He introduced the new form of writing called, Narrative. He first started off by asking the class, "What is Prose?" Alexis answered, "Text in its original form."
Mr. Rivers then posted an original screenplay by him titled, "Super Teachers." It consisted of a simple format using the conventional patterns. Some conventions he mentioned were: Patterns of formatting, a screenplay is not equal to a novel, Its a common language between the artists that allow collaborations, and that using the simple format presents professionalism and precision. The class started to go over the screenplay and identify some other conventions.
The first convention that was identifies was the Scene Heading also known as, "Slugline." The Slugline begins with the interior and exterior, then the setting comes after as well as, the time of day. The next convention was the Action Block. This is what we see the characters doing on screen. The next one was the Characters. These people perform the actions and dialogue on the screen. Speaking of dialogue, the next convention is Dialogue. This is what the character says on screen. The last Convention is called Parenthetical. In a screenplay, the emotion of the character would be put in the parenthesis.
The last thing we did in class was re-write an action block to give it more action than description. These conventions are a correlated to the lesson plans from the following days as we watched the movie Dodgeball. This concludes the lesson for screenplays. Tomorrow the class will follow up on the conventions we learned today.