Customer Reviews

The Short Screenplay: Your Short Film from Concept to Production (Aspiring Filmmaker's Library)

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With YouTube and the global adoption of the internet delivered marketing messages, WE have become the screen writers of the 21st century. Gurskis provides a straight forward Help Guide on How To create the core story and successfully deliver the message to this new and exploding audience. Clearly Gurskis with 20+ years of experience both professionally as an Emmy Award winner but also academically as Chair of the Department of Film Studies at Brooklyn College walks the novice screen writer through this process. I rate this an entrepreneurs' five star, must-read.

I use this book for all my screenwriting and production classes at the Savannah College of Art and Design. For clarity and readablity, it is unmatched, and all my students agree. If you buy just one book about screenplay writing, this should be it.

heuristic - enabling a person to discover or learn something for themselves. That's what "The Short Screenplay" provides for screenwriters. Like a good script, it uses short sentences, active accurate verbs and a minimum of modifiers. Gurskis includes useful examples without dropping names or reminiscing. By doing so, he provides a screenwriting reference that supports your own writing process and emotional connection to the work. Though it's about short screenplays, I use it for all of my screenwriting. If I were going to teach a screenwriting class, this would be the text.

This is an excellent "how-to-do-it" book. Writing a short screenplay is especially challenging because there is so little screen time to develop a good plot and tell an interesting story without excessive dialog. The screenplay must evoke a visual experience that guides the director and entertains the audience. The author presents a series of "rules" that can help to achieve good results, but he leaves the subject matter up to the screenwriter. This is as it should be, leaving plenty of room for creative expression. M.H.

My Professor selected this book for a Short Screenplay Writing class this semester and I am really enjoying it. The author has provided definitions of key film concepts in the text which is great for learning and review.