Meetings in March and early April

All of our forthcoming meetings except 9 March are happening in the Macready Room at Bristol Old Vic, 36 King Street, Bristol, BS1 4DZ — our 9 March session will be in Meeting Room 1. Always check at the theatre’s reception desk to the right of the box office for confirmation of the venue. Everyone attending meetings pays £1.

Don’t forget that you can find an up-to-date list of the dates and times of our current programme on the Diary page of our website. The site’s home page also shows the date of our next meeting in the panel on the right beneath the slideshow.

Tuesday, 2 March at 7.30pm: Ten-Page Challenge entries
Our curtain-raising competition for 2010 is now closed for submissions, but we still have the opening decade of pages of six new scripts to workshop. Time permitting, tonight’s session will feature work by Kate Thomas, Michelle Preston, Stephen Evans, John Boas, Andy Graham and Elaine Eveleigh — we’ll need to reschedule any work we can’t include tonight for one of the following dates if we overrun.

Tuesday, 9 March at 7.30pm in Meeting Room 1: Terms of Business by Dhana Sabanathan
In Dhana’s feature-length screenplay, Alex Bloomberg is a young man excited to start work at a top City law firm who is bemused by his elder brother’s decision to join the police force. As Alex faces the highs and lows of his glamorous professional life, the brothers’ paths are thrown together unexpectedly following a knife attack on a seven year old child.

Tuesday, 16 March at 7.30pm: Open Workshop

Tuesday, 23 March at 7.30pm: Open Workshop

Tuesday, 30 March at 7.30pm: Open Workshop

Tuesday, 6 April at 7.30pm: Open Workshop

 

Southwest Scriptwriters in Theatre 24 dash

Group members Gill Kirk and Tim Atack were two of four writers who worked with 60 actors and six directors to create a show in 24 hours at Bristol Old Vic on Valentine’s Day. Both feature briefly in video coverage of the Theatre 24 event here.

 

Being Human connection for former Honorary Presidents

Southwest Scriptwriters’ former Honorary President Lucy Catherine wrote the third in the current series of the BBC Three comedy-drama Being Human, first broadcast on Sunday, 24 January.

Take Me Out, Lucy’s psychological ghost story set in and around Hartcliffe, was one of 12 proposals shortlisted from 550 submissions for South West Screen’s iFeatures project (reported in our October 2009 e-bulletin). Three of the finalists will be chosen following development for production and release in cinemas early next year.

Leonora Crichlow who plays Annie, the ghost, in Being Human also stars in the pilot episode of Catherine Johnson’s TV comedy, Dappers. Set in Bristol, Dappers follows the story of two single mothers living in housing association flats in Clifton who are pitched as ‘Del Boy and Rodders in thongs’. The producers hope that Dappers will be commissioned as a BBC3 series.

You can find further information on Dappers on the BBC Bristol website here.

 

MA Writing for the Media at Bournemouth University

Bournemouth University is now recruiting for its 12-month Writing for the Media Masters degree, which aims to develop students’ individual creative voices as writers and the range of their authorial skills, enabling them to write for a variety of media — including film, television and new media.

The course is designed for writers, graduates, members of the media industry and other suitable professions, or for those seeking writing careers in the media. Students will engage with cross-media projects in film, television, radio and new media. An innovative range of assignments will enable students to embark upon scripts for a variety of media, including Graphic Fiction, Interactive Narratives, Online Drama, Digital Writing, Twitter Fiction, animation and short film dramas for mobile phones. Scripts by the writing students will be made by fellow students on production degrees in an umbrella suite of postgraduate courses of which Writing for the Media will be a part. Writers will work with directors, producers, editors, new media and radio producers to create programmes.

The normal entry requirement for the course is a degree or comparable qualification, but appropriate experience is taken into account and all applications are treated on an individual basis.

 

Style and Structure evening course at Bristol Old Vic

Following his Under the Skin workshop on character writing, which ran for six weeks at the theatre last autumn (reported here in June 2009), David Lane leads a second Bristol Old Vic Writers’ Room evening course — SAS: Combating Style and Structure — for eight weeks at 7pm on Thursday evenings from 15 April until 3 June.

‘They’re not quite at war, but choices about style and structure are highly influential in governing how our plays communicate themselves to an audience. This course investigates the differences between style and structure with an emphasis on reading contemporary and classical plays, and applying those models to writing exercises and participants’ current projects. Over eight sessions — incorporating two home sessions for reading and writing tasks — this course is ideal for writers with some experience who want to broaden their range of choices and discover unique forms for expressing their work.’