David Griffith from Shots to Sentences
David Griffith is professional filmmaker and film educator. In addition to writing, producing and directing for film and TV, he teaches Screenwriting at the University of Strathclyde CLL and Filmmaking at the SAE Institute. He has also written a hugely popular and widely used screenwriting guide for young people, ‘Crash Course in Screenwriting’ (Scottish Screen, 2003) and a practical guide to making films with groups of young people, ‘On the Move’ (Urban Learning Space, 2008). He is Chair of the Film Education Resource Development Group for Scottish Film Education.
Teaching young people how to structure and punctuate compelling written narratives is one of the most significant challenges facing teachers whatever their subject specialism.
While film may appear to some to be a transparent or even ‘illustrative’ medium, it is in fact a logical and consistent system of narratology with clearly defined sentences, paragraphs and chapters.
Filmmaker and screenwriting lecturer, David Griffith shows how a basic understanding of audio-visual language and rhetoric – as well as its correspondences (and differences) to sign-based texts – can be used in the classroom to teach young people the key concepts and choices that underlie and determine all forms of narrative construction, whether factual or fictional.