Featured Courses

Script Analysis

This class will give students the tools needed to read scripts with active curiosity, so that you can bring the script to life in unique and specific ways. Your enhanced understanding of the script will improve your performance. You will explore specific techniques that allow you to identify inciting events, main events, character relationships, themes and genre and all the particulars that make storytelling powerful and clear. The course begins with an introduction to the approach, followed by in-depth analysis of assigned scripts each week. We will be breaking down a screenplay, a play and a popular TV pilot together. You will each explore a character from each of the scripts, and perform excerpts from scripts and/or sides analyzed in this class.

INSTRUCTOR
Magaly Colimon

Breakthrough Lab

Presented by Snezhana Chernova –

To be held both in-person and online:

(Previously known as Independent Study Project Lab). For artists who are interested in developing their own projects, this is an independent class working solo or with a partner on an independent study project that you devise, under the guidance of HB faculty, Snezhana Chernova. Examples of projects include: Writing a screenplay/play, doing a podcast, doing a live stream performance series, monologues or scenes, creating a TV pilot, writing music, shooting a documentary or short/feature film, writing poetry etc.

You must submit an application at this link for review and approval prior to registering. Within the application you will be asked to include a work-plan, proposed outcome, and the estimated number of hours required to complete the project. Creative projects might be shared in public presentations at the end of the term and/or on HB Studio’s social media channels.

Undertaking independent study requires a commitment to check-ins with the instructor and  weekly 2.5 hour group meetings to report objectives, progress, trouble shoot, present projects, and exchange ideas. An additional one-on-one 30 minute session with the instructor may be held each week.

This Independent Study Project Lab requires a commitment of 4 hours per week.

This Lab is offered with meetings in person at HB Studio on Mondays from 10:00 am to 12:30pm with the possibility to meet online if the project requires so.

Screenwriting for the Short Film

Instructor: Ashish Pant–

Held online: 

This is an introductory course in which you will learn basic principles of screenwriting, including how it differs from other forms of writing. The class will introduce you to the screenplay format, the terminology, the classical narrative structure, and tools and exercises for preparing to write a screenplay.

Over the course of the term we will use writing exercises to develop a script for an 8-to-12 minute short film. To be a writer, you have to write, and this is a writing-intensive class. In the second half of the term, you will workshop your short screenplays and rewrite and rewrite. Through the workshop we will learn to both receive and give feedback on screenplays written in the class.

We will watch several short films in class as examples of different kinds of short films that could inspire you as well as to investigate the underlying structure of short films. Several handouts will be provided in the class that you will be expected to read for homework.

In addition we will watch three feature length films during the term that will be used to discuss screenwriting concepts. You will watch these films as homework, so please be prepared to spend an additional $9-10 for renting/streaming these movies.