VISUAL WRITING || SEPT 8
VISUAL WRITING || ONLINE MASTER COURSE
COURSE:
A Six Week Online Master Screenwriting Course
Studying with Max Adams
Course Dates: 09.08.26
Course Fee: $475
Course Location: ONLINE
Visual Writing is an accelerated screenwriting master class studying online with author & award winning screenwriter Max Adams. During six weeks of advanced study, students will study the three foundations of scene visuals, analyze produced scripts and film clips provided in class, complete advanced course assignments and exercises, and participate in weekly online discussions reviewing and analyzing course materials and course assignments with Max Adams.
COURSE SYLLABUS:
WEEK ONE: Setting Location ||
Lecture: Space, Light, Texture
WEEK TWO: Perspective ||
Lecture: The Window or the Man?
WEEK THREE: Exterior vs. Interior ||
Lecture: Car Chase is Not a Location
WEEK FOUR: Character Intro’s ||
Lecture: Short Skirt Does Not Equal Character
WEEK FIVE: Static Locations vs. Dynamic Locations ||
Lecture: Dead Movement Equals Dead Movie
WEEK SIX: Verbs & Movement ||
Lecture: Walk, Leap, or Stroll
WEEK SEVEN: Grace Week ||
No Lecture
WE WILL BE COVERING:
- The three visual cornerstones
- Setting locations visually
- Introducing characters visually
- Authorial intrusion — when & how to use it, and when you need to lose it
- Introducing visual elements from general to specific — and why that counts
- Line of sight and how to use it
- Perspective — how to create it, how to anchor it, and how to maintain it
- How to direct visuals without camera cues
- Filters — when & how to use them, and when & how to lose them
- Drawing on a reader’s visuals memory vault to enhance writing impact
- And more —
YOU WILL TAKE AWAY:
- Actionable craft tools that, implemented in your own scripts, will immediately improve your existing & future feature and television scripts, ceating stronger impact with and a cinematic reading experience for future readers and industry professionals considering material for option, purchase, development, attachment and production.
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Ratings and Reviews
Louis Bernstein
This course offers one of most fundamental tools you’ll ever use as a screenwriter; how to take your ideas and then present them as scenes, characters, and action, in a precise, and effective visual way that lands with impact on your reader. Using clear lessons, workshop exercises and helpful discussions, you will learn and master these visual writing skills. A must for all screenwriters.
5 people found this helpful.
Cathy Petrick
This was my favorite class. "Space, light, texture" is the mantra that has stuck with me and inspired me ever since. The practice we received writing scene-setting descriptions from photographs was extremely effective because it trained us to pay attention to the path of the eye wandering through a scene, and to record a sequence of visual details in the natural order.
6 people found this helpful.
Debi Yazbeck
Anytime I read a script and wonder where in the fuck I'm supposed to be, I can't concentrate on the story. This is supposed to be visual! Max taught me how to first orient my reader so that they can sit back and take the ride of the story. There's an art to this, just like there is in the entirety of the script - this part just comes first.
6 people found this helpful.
Peter Andrews
This was the course I needed. Writing for speeches and for radio (no pictures) and writing novels (fill pages) had not prepared me to create clear, compelling images in readers' heads. And do in concisely. I got exactly what I was looking for with this course thanks to powerful lectures, hands-on assignments, and great discussions.
6 people found this helpful.
Michele Koop
This class brought my screenwriting to a whole new level, and I’ve never looked back. If you want to immerse the reader visually so that they can ‘see’ the movie as they read, and you do - Max Adams teaches how to do this succinctly yet powerfully. A must take class for any screenwriter!
6 people found this helpful.
Nektarios Chrissos
What can I say? It's easy for us screenwriters to visualise scenery and action within our brain, but when the time comes to write them on paper - well, you surely know the feeling. After this course, visual descriptions in your screenplays won't be the same. By implementing Max's rules, you will deliver succinct yet enticing visual descriptions in your stories; make the story 's images pop out!
6 people found this helpful.
TESTIMONIALS
Alvaro Rodriguez
Screenwriter
Debi Yazbeck
Screenwriter/Producer/Director
CK Love
Screenwriter/Author
Tony Ferrendelli
Screenwriter
About Max Adams
MAX ADAMS is an author and award winning screenwriter. She has written for Columbia Pictures, Sony Pictures, Tri-Star Pictures, Hollywood Pictures, Touchstone Pictures, Walt Disney Studios, Universal Pictures — and a couple others to remain unnamed because no one around here wants to get black listed.
Max is a former volunteer AFI Alumni reader and WGAw online mentor, former Nicholl reader and judge, has appeared as a speaker at, among other places, AMPAS, USC, and Film Arts Foundation, is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at University of Utah and a former lecturer & instructor at New York Film Academy, is the author of The Screenwriter’s Survival Guide AND The New Screenwriter’s Survival Guide, is the founder of two international online screenwriting workshops — and TheAFW — and has the dubious distinction of having been dubbed “Red Hot Adams” by Daily Variety for selling three pitches over a holiday weekend — which made her agents cry.
[In a good way.]
She answers now to both “Max” and “Red Hot” in crowds and dog parks.
Max has been writing, selling, mentoring, and teaching for two decades. Four or her workshoppers have won Nicholl Fellowships from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences. Many of her students and workshoppers have gone on to option, sell, publish, and produce work.
After just the first couple lectures of Visual Writing I thought that if I stopped at that point, I'd walk away with my writing dramatically improved. Amazing! Max does it again! I'm now in the year-long process of taking all the AFW masterclasses!