Screenwriting In A Digital Era

Screenwriting in a Digital Era examines the practices of writing for the screen from early Hollywood to Dogme, the new realism and beyond. Looking back to prehistories of the form, Kathryn Millard links screenwriting to visual and oral storytelling. From the shadow playwrights of twelfth century Egypt to semi-improvised ensemble films played out on the streets of cities around the globe, she draws on a wealth of insights from music, photography, performance, writing, psychology and organisational studies to explore the creative processes underlying writing for the screen.

Looking also to the future, Screenwriting in a Digital Era examines the blurring of genres, production stages and roles in digital ecologies and the rise of sustainable screenwriting. Review: '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