Middle Years Student Screenplays

I had my students write screenplays before and although they produced a decent script, I was not totally content with the group work I saw.  Because the films they were making would be larger groups of four or five students,  most of the time I noticed that one or two students who had a knack for writing would take control and do most of the work.  The real teamwork and collaboration happened when they produced the screenplays as films, which was good, but I still wanted to improve the collaboration that went into the screenplay.  This year I decided to change my process a little bit.

What I started with was talking about what makes a good movie.  We had a brainstorm discussion and came up with a plethora of ideas, but the elements that I really wanted to focus on were conflict and action.

Following this I did a lesson on what a treatment was, and I had my students rush produce a one page treatment with the premise that it was easy to film and that we could film it in our school.  I took the treatments that were best suited for a quick middle school production and assigned them out to two person groups to write out a screenplay.

I did a brief overview lesson on what is a screenplay, looking at how we write them, and how we format them.
I found this AFI Screen Nation document useful for my students at it contains good reference information and some excellent examples.

AFI Basics Handout

I didn't go crazy with margins and such, instead focusing on concepts like showing not telling how a character is feeling, using the proper font, and giving location headings.  We spent a lot of time discussing examples from movies, and brainstorming questions about how to show how a character if a character is lonely, popular, happy, etc.

I handed out the treatments and suggested that my students work on these by using a collaborative document environment like Google Docs.  As students were working in groups of two or three I found that in class there was a lot of conversation about creative choices that I didn't see in earlier projects.  At the end of the project I don't know if we will be able to use everyone's screenplay, but I really like the way the project is going right now.  I plan on writing more about this in the future as I continue to develop new media production projects in my classroom.