Colorado College Supplement

From Story to Script: Adapting Literature for the Screen.

Overview:

This course introduces the basic process of adapting literary fiction to the screen. Students will  identify characteristics of stories that can effectively be adapted for film; profile characters from written works and their screen adaptations; and compare adapted screenplays to their original counterparts, dissecting the techniques that screenwriters use to revise a text to a format suitable for visual media. By the end of the course students will write a final adapted screenplay based on an original text of their choosing.

Learning Objectives:

• Critically analyze techniques and styles used by writers in multiple genres.
• Profile characters by describing their most important qualities from screenplays and the original text.
• Effectively compose scenes from pre-existing stories, identifying key pieces of information that must be included as well as details that can be eliminated.

Course Description:

More than 60% of screenplays made into films from 2005-2014 were adapted from a medium not initially intended for film. In this course, we investigate the techniques that writers use to adapt everything from literary classics to Marvel Comics.

In the first week of the course, students will read screenplays from a variety of genres along with their original literary counterparts, discussing strategies and techniques for preparing the story for the screen. Students will profile characters from the original works, defining which traits are essential and how they are carried forward into the screenplay. In addition, students will explore techniques that are used to preserve the mood, plot, and characters that are unique to specific genres.

In the second week students will analyze selected written works and determine whether or not they are amenable to adaptation for film, considering what makes a novel translate well to the screen. We will reflect on how key characters can be incorporated into the story and, when appropriate, how to blend the features of multiple characters into one, taking into account the activity each combined character has over the entire story. Similarly we will discuss which components of the story are essential and which are unnecessary to the story, selecting the key elements of plot that should be incorporated in the context of a more limited time frame.

In the final week of the course students will learn to use the medium of film to tell a story without a first person narrator; manipulate critical aspects of internal dialogue in the narrative by either externalizing the dialogue or conveying it through the characters actions; and preserve the mood and tone of the original text through visual storytelling.

At the end of the course students will select a text and adapt it for the screen, taking into account: character profiles, overarching plot, themes, mood, and techniques discussed over the course.

Prerequisites:

• Introduction to Film Studies
• Screenwriting