I just finished my first teaching assignment on our trip – two days at the Danish film school. I have taught in Copenhagen four times in the last 20+ years and three times for this Danish film school which is fairly new. I love this venue!
These red theater seats are so cheerful
and it’s such a beautiful room!
The students are quite advanced – most of them are professional. They are writing for television and for film and some of them are screenwriting teachers.
So, the seminar was pitched at an advanced level and was great for me to teach some of the subject matter I don’t usually teach. It also seemed great for the students since they really are beyond screenwriting basics and I wanted to bring them some new material.
They are so responsive. They have good questions. They are very appreciative and express that which makes it great to work with them as well.
I have worked with Tina three times now and I love coming back to the same places. We stay at this Admiral hotel which is very nautical, warm and cozy.
One of our surprises this time was the incredible elegance of the Nordic food. We ate twice in the hotel and then on Sunday night we went to a Nordic restaurant that had three courses but had these little tastes in between. One of the courses was a kind of artichoke mousse with berries and a kind of brown and course and bark roasted cheese. It certainly didn’t taste like what we thought of as bark but it was absolutely delicious. Peter and I had cod with a parsley sauce. The dessert was a raspberry sorbet with a kind of chipped cheese on the top. We should have written everything down but we were too busy being ecstatic plus I was quite tired! Oh and YES, we ate mushrooms! You can see three of them on top of the grass in one of the photos of Tina.
I used to do seminars from 9:30 am to 5 pm, but in the last few years I have been doing the seminars from 10 am to 4 pm and it makes a HUGE difference for me but I actually think it’s good for the participants. I think they can better integrate the material and maybe they aren’t so exhausted at the end of the day.
I show a lot of film clips to illustrate points and I stop and start them a lot to point out what the participants should notice that illustrates screenwriting concepts. Plus they’re simply fun to watch. A great scene or a great film can be watched over and over again and it remains fresh and engaging. The more you watch it, the more you realize how absolutely fabulous the writing is. I recently added the movie AS GOOD AS IT GETS and we watched a variety of clips that take about 40 minutes. But we actually take several hours to watch it because there is so much great dialogue and character terrific structure. It illustrates everything I talk about for the first day and a half. Plus, it’s a great example of the transformational arc! And it is always great to be transformed!