Lemonhead held it's very first course in script writing and a good group of 11 students applied for the 10 sessions programme. The sessions were held at the MCAST Naxxar premises. All sessions were conducted by Lemonhead director Bryan Muscat.

One of the students participating in Lemonhead's Script Writing Course, Keith Chircop, gave us an account of how the sessions are going.

Before the first lesson started, the students introduced themselves to each other in the lobby of the Higher Secondary School in Naxxar. Some of the students already knew each other - they were members of the Lemonhead acting group with an interest in the scriptwriting process. Lecturer, and Lemonhead founder, Bryan Muscat led the way to the classroom where the lesson began.

Bryan started off with an overview of what scripts are, what they should not be, and the different ways in which a script can be utilized. He then went into the different formats a script can have for each particular medium, before launching into a breakdown of all the steps and processes that lead a blank page to becoming a final draft. Bryan also described what happens once the rights to the script change hands from writer to producer, with emphasis on how Maltese productions go about this.

The second lesson focused on the difference between formats and how the writer must keep in mind what medium the script is being written for, not only because the layouts are different, but also because different media require different writing styles. Bryan then went in detail about the elements that form a script.

During the third lesson, Bryan showed that by using powerful scriptwriting software, time that would otherwise be used to set formats to meet industry standards can be saved and used to focus on the creative process.

In the fourth meeting the class started to apply what it had learnt in the previous lessons. In the first half of the lesson, Bryan split the class in two and both teams had to brainstorm for ideas and concepts. The second half was dedicated to writing a scene involving a fight between two lovebirds. Each student then read out aloud the scene he/she had written and Bryan mentioned the good, the bad, and the ugly.

At the beginning of the fifth lesson the students who hadn't yet read their scenes out aloud did so, then Bryan, as well as the other students, gave their opinions. Homework for this lesson included writing a scene using the ideas brought up during the brainstorming exercise of lesson 4. For the rest of the lesson, the two groups from the previous lesson re-assembled and the members of each group had to agree (and disagree) on which ideas to keep to form the best plot possible. This gave students hands-on experience on writing as part of a team.

KEITH CHIRCOP