Screenwriting Workshop

What makes a good story? How does screenwriting differ from other types of writing? In this workshop we will explore the fundamental principles of visual and aural storytelling: characterization, dialogue, subtext, screenplay structure, inciting incident, conflict, exposition, climax and resolution. You will be asked to share your material with the rest of the class, and to serve as story editors on your peers’ work. By the end of the workshop, you will have written a rough draft of a short (3-5min) film.

This workshop will be led by Temenuga Trifonova.

Temenuga Trifonova is Associate Professor in Creative Arts and Humanities: Moving Image at UCL. She is the author of Precarity in Western European Cinema (forthcoming from Amsterdam University Press in 2025), Screening the Art World (Amsterdam University Press, 2022), The Figure of the Migrant in Contemporary European Cinema (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), Contemporary Visual Culture and the Sublime (Routledge, 2018), Warped Minds: Cinema and Psychopathology (Amsterdam University Press, 2014), European Film Theory (Routledge, 2008), The Image in French Philosophy (Rodopi, 2007), and the novels Tourist (Black Scat Books, 2018) and Rewrite (NON Publishing, 2014). Her feature film Tourist (2018), adapted from her novel, won Best Feature at Mostra del Cinema di Taranto (2018). Her short film The Art of Book Reviewing won Best Screenplay at the Strand Books & Nitehawk Lit on Film Fest in New York (2018) and was finalist in the 2017 Notting Hill Editions Film Essay Prize. Another short film, A Museum Guard, screened at the dokumentART festival in Neubrandenburg (2018).

Host or Publisher Newham Libraries