Write one-to-three loglines, post them in your project page and receive feedback on your loglines from your classmates

-OR-

Choose one of the following three instructor-provided loglines, which can be specifically-tailored to your story.

• An arrogant principal goes to extreme lengths to impress his boyhood crush when she returns to their hometown after taking a job at his school.
• A disgraced ex-cop turned private investigator seeks redemption following a grisly discovery.
• An alcoholic baker battles the competition and her own demons while participating in a national baking contest.

(Note: The preferred option for all students is creating your own logline(s) and getting feedback from classmates on them before working on your script, not using the instructor-provided ones.)

Step 2: Write Your Script

Write the first ten page of a feature-length screenplay and upload it to the project gallery or post a link to the externally-hosted script (Google Docs is one such place to do so). Include as many versions on your project page as you see fit along with explanations of changes you made or requests for specific help.

Step 3: Give Feedback

Give feedback to at least five of your classmates about their ten page script, whether in an early draft or the final version.

While not necessary to use while giving feedback, here is a rubric that could help standardize some of the feedback. Please rate on a scale from 1-10 in the following categories:

• Premise (the fundamental concept that drives the plot)
• Plot (the organization of the main events, including the inciting incident)
• Character (how interesting are the characters, and different from one another)
• Dialogue (does the dialogue sound true, or stilted)
• Setting (does the world of the script draw you in, and it is realistic within the story)

Also, give an overall score for the script (on the scale of 1-10), which doesn't need to be an average of the preceeding categories. Finally, write a few sentences of both the script's strengths and weaknesses. I understand how difficult it can be to give someone a low score but hopefully we can use this opportunity to help each other if we can put away the temporary sting of seeing someone score our work not as highly as we hoped!

Note: After careful consideration, and a lot of thought, I updated the scale from 1-5 to 1-10. My thinking is that this gives people a little more leeway in grading out the individual. For a point of reference, I would group 1-3 into the "needs work" category, 4-6 in the "somewhere around average," 7-8 meaning "everyone should take notice of how they did in this category," with a 9-10 meaning "if I was a studio script reader I would risk my job flagging this script/category as exceptional." This same kind of scale is used for the overall grading of the script as a whole, where sometimes the pieces add up to more, or less, than the overall script (and why I mentioned that the overall really shouldn't be, or doesn't need to be an average of all of the categories).

In closing, building a community of screenwriters is a MAJOR goal of this course, so make sure to participate, whether it be through feedback on your classmate's pages or through the discussion boards!