Screenwriting in a Digital Era

Kathryn Millard is an essayist,  filmmaker and academic. She has written, produced and directed award-wining feature films including  drama, documentary and hybrid works. Kathryn is Professor of Screen and Creative Arts at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

'Kathryn Millard's brilliant book asks: what is involved in screenwriting in the digital era? Surely much more than just words on a page. With images, sounds, fragments of story, impressions of place, and research materials, we improvise, perform, assemble, re-mix on our computers. We project our imagination into the world (real or otherwise) that we hope to capture on screen. Conventional accounts of screenwriting find the classic story templates wherever they look; Millard, by contrasts, finds the 'seeds of the new' everywhere in the experiments of the past. Hers is the first truly international survey to look beyond Hollywood for its rich and varied inspiration. It is a book for the future of cinema and all screen media.' - Adrian Martin, Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany 'Screenwriting in a Digital Era is an extraordinary work comprising gem-like essays about the nature of creativity and collaboration that illuminates the working methods of a diverse group of filmmakers. She explores the ways pictures and stories have been combined through time, taking us from Egyptian shadow plays to European magic lanterns to contemporary global digital cinema.' - Kelley Conway, University of Madison-Wisconsin, USA

• Introduction 1. The Picture Storytellers: from pad to iPad 2. Post Courier 12 3. The New 3 Rs of Digital Writing: Record, Reenact and Remix 4. 13 Lessons on Screenwriting from Errol Morris 5. Adaptation: Writing as Rewriting and The Lost Thing 6. Degrees of Improvisation 7. Improvising Reality 8. Composing the Digital Screenplay 9. Collaboration: Writing the Possible Conclusion: Sustainable Screenwriting Endnotes Select Bibliography