WINTER 2021
Four Sessions | 4-6pm CST Monday, Tuesday & Wednesday, March 15th, 16th &17th and Friday, March 19th
From Start to Feature
Story Development Fundamentals
A lot of people have an idea for a film, but without a narrative to take the audience on a journey, a script can't make it to the screen. Over the course of a week, this workshop will guide you through the steps to prepare the story structure of your screenplay.
You'll learn the fundamentals of screenwriting-- building compelling characters and how to apply three act structure to serve your plot, theme, and character arcs.
WORKSHOP OVERVIEW
In this workshop we’ll explore the foundational elements of the feature film: conflict, structure, character, and theme and emotional resonance. No two stories come into being in exactly the same way; sometimes a writer will have a character in mind, or a scene, or a theme that they want to explore. Regardless of what participants arrive with, this workshop aims to give them the tools to expand that single kernel into a fully realized idea that contains the requisite ingredients to sustain a feature film.
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First, we will discuss conflict as the foundation of all drama. and what kinds of competing objectives and forces are able to serve as the central conflict for participant’s stories.
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Next, we’ll cover three-act story structure; both as it relates to the overall story and to protagonists’ character arcs.
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Finally, we will discuss the importance of theme and emotional resonance, one of the most vital aspects of any story which ensures that regardless of the characters or plot, a story contains a common humanity and universality that allows it to transcend lines of race, gender, socio-economic, age, and life experience. Often, the emotional resonance becomes a key ingredient of the theme, which is what keeps a story clear and focused. Participants will also learn the important distinction of plot versus theme.
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Once these principles are scaffolded, participants will put them to use and create their own loglines. A logline is a 2-4 sentence summary which distills the central conflict of the story down into a concise, evocative format that can be used for pitching and for expanding on when it’s time to further develop the story.
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After all participants have a functional logline, they will then expand them into a treatment. A treatment is a one to two-page synopsis of their movie that gives a more detailed summary explanation of the world, the characters, and the central conflict.
Daniel Lafrentz
A Director known for his passion, work ethic, and warmth, Daniel Lafrentz is an award-winning bi-coastal filmmaker with a potent blend of the art and craft he learned in Los Angeles, seasoned with the flavor he found making his home in New Orleans. Getting involved with his community and exploring the countryside is how he developed a gift for creating authentic, lived-in worlds, and the working-class underdogs usually at the center of his work.
The proof-of-concept for Daniel’s New Orleans-set dad-tective pilot, Saint City, premiered at the Austin Film Festival and Dances With Films. Daniel’s debut feature, a bayou-noir called The Long Shadow, won a Jury Prize at the New Orleans Film Festival where it was acquired by Gravitas Ventures and then released on Showtime. Before that, his UCLA MFA thesis, the genre-bending Horror/Western Bleeding, Kansas, won the Hollywood Foreign Press Association Award.
Daniel also produced the feature documentary titled Time II Unfinished Business directed by Fox Rich, the indomitable matriarch of the Oscar-nominated TIME (2020), which premiered on Amazon Prime on Juneteenth, 2026. In this poignant sequel to their own personal saga, Fox and Rob Rich return to the battleground of Louisiana’s carceral state to fight for the release of their nephew and co-defendant from the clutches of a merciless system and ultimately discover that the purpose of freedom is to free others.
When he’s not practicing and performing with his all-men’s dance team and service club, the 610 Stompers, Daniel tells stories about gentle people fighting to survive in an indifferent, sometimes cruel world, which makes his work a lot like him: a little dark, a little funny, and full of heart.