Scriptwriting Workshop

Yesterday we took part in a scriptwriting workshop, which was run by Doug Chamberlin. Doug is a professional scriptwriter and has worked on many projects writing for both T.V and film, one of his well-known projects is Toy Story 2.
The workshop began with Doug introducing himself giving us a brief outline of his background and experiences as well as him finding out a little bit about each of us, our interests and what we do at Artswork Media.

Once the introductions were over, we moved on to discussing good and bad sitcoms, looking at their premise. In this discussion Doug read out some sitcom premises and we had to decide whether they were funny or not. From his short exercise we discovered that the more successfully sitcoms such as Friends, Father Ted, Fawlty Towers all had simple premises that didn’t come across as funny; more of the unsuccessful sitcoms that may have ran for only a few episodes or possible one season had a suggestive funny element to their premise such as My Mother the Car.
What we learnt from this exercise was a sitcom premise doesn’t have to be funny it’s just to provide an outline of what the programme is about. The comedy elements slowly develop within the re-writes and with the character developments.

The second exercise was to list things, which can differentiate different characters within a sitcom. Some example we came up with:
- Gender
- Age
- Race
- Morals
- Religion
- Height
- Weight
- Hair Colour
- Type A / Type B
- Relationship Status
- Fashion Sense
- Class
- Regional Background

We then discussed the three types of humor different characters can portray. These were:
- Machine
- Child
- Animal.



Using these exercises we began planning and brainstorming for our own sitcom.
First we all needed to decide on a location of where our sitcom would be set.
After brainstorming, it was decided our sitcom would be set in a Theme Park.
Keeping this location in mind we had to work together and decide on what job roles would be available to use within a theme park. For example:
- Ticket Officer
- Car park Attendant
- Ride Operator
- Snack Bar Girl
- Manager
- Cleaner
- Maintenance Guy
- Cartoon Character
- Security Officer

We then discussed what characteristics and personality traits would work well with each character, using the examples from the first exercise.




We decided that we would have a paranoid ticket officer, an old car park attendant, young manager, beautiful and smart snack bar girl, lazy security woman and a posh cleaner who is on patrol, the cartoon character’s identity would remain a mystery.
Having decided these first draft character traits we discussed possible situations that could happen within an episode of the sitcom. One main idea everyone seemed to be drawn to was the idea of the electricity being cut off and the problems and disruptions it would cause to the theme park and between the different staff members.



After that exercise the workshop came to a close. But I found the whole workshop to be very interesting and fun to take part in. It has provided me with a greater insight of how sitcoms start of as very simple, unfunny ideas that can develop into something very comical, just by taking the time to develop the characters, stories and the key thing is to keep re-writing.