Thursday 25 November 2010

Writing Digital Fiction

This sounds quite good if you've 6 days.

Tutors: Melanie Martinez •Luke Hyams

Date: 11 December 2010
Duration: 6 days over 3 weekends Dec & Jan
Venue: Dublin
Cost: €200.00

Application Procedure:
Please apply online attaching a current CV. Please also forward a one page outline idea suitable for development as an online/digital media series to criona.sexton@fas.ie

Participant Profile:
This course is aimed at writers who are interested in developing their skills in series writing specifically for online, interactive and digital media fiction. The first module of this course will run in December and the other 2 modules in January.

Course Profile:
Writers will cover all stages and steps involved in project development from identification of a good idea through to full scripts. Writers will work together under the direction of experienced Head Writers Luke Hyams (Kate Modern, Dubplate Drama) and Melanie Martinez (Sophia’s Diary) to develop and write a drama series for online exploitation. The course will replicate the writer’s room experience. Luke Hyams and Melanie Martinez will co-ordinate writing phases of projects in a “Showrunner” capacity, developing writers’ understanding of working in a professional Writer’s Room environment as well as the craft and skill of creating digital fiction projects.

Writers will work together in teams to develop outlines, treatments, series bibles and project pitches, first draft scripts, along with outlines for online character pages, micro-sites, blogs, and transmedia elements as may be appropriate for their projects. The course will also explore the opportunities which exist for writers to develop projects which appeal to new and emerging markets for media.

The course will cover the following:

• Team Writing, and working in the Writer’s Room

• An understanding of the internet and transmedia storytelling

• Finding an audience, audience identification, audience engagement

• Concept and Idea generation

• Recognising a saleable idea

• The different online narrative formats

• Ideas and the market

• Story development, durations and demographics

• Playing with the format, continuous narrative, episodic tags and hooks

• Understanding genre and tone

• Trends in Transmedia/Cross-Platform Projects

• Writing for different platforms

• Building an online community

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Analogous to asking gardeners to bring window boxes to learn about estate management. Digital fiction is so much more than TV via the web, their outline doesn't reflect the actual nature of digital fiction.. so 200 quid to learn about yesterday's trends seems a waste of money actually...

Emerging Writer said...

what are today's (and tomorrow's) trends then? Where would you recommend interested people to look?

Unknown said...

There's a couple of places on the net, that writers interested in digital fiction should first check out, before handing anyone money:

starting here:
http://collection.eliterature.org/1/
or here:
http://grandtextauto.org/
even here:
http://netpoetic.com/

there are many more, like my friend Chris Meade's excellent:
http://www.bookfutures.blogspot.com

or indeed check out most of my friend links on the right of my own site @www.michaeljmaguire.com from the Alan of webyarns fame to Christy the transmedia specialist.

shameless plug that one above, yet digital writing and transmedia have been passions of mine for quite a while now...

Emerging Writer said...

thanks very much. I'll check these out. And if you fancy doing a guest post (for beginners!), let me know