What will I learn?

The programme provides students with a broad experience that develops their creative voice and writing style, while learning how to write outlines, treatments and scripts for theatre, film, television and interactive media. The tutors on the programme are working professional writers and the programme is networked into local Bristol and national industry partners. It is delivered by Bristol School of Acting, a drama school that has both Acting for Screen and Acting for Stage and Screen programmes, facilitating deep collaboration between the student writers with training actors, as well as with the film and theatre directors who come to work at the school. The programme connects with Bristol Old Vic Theatre who have revived their Literary Department as part of a drive to make the theatre a regional centre for new theatre writing. BSA is co-producing a new writing festival with Bristol Old Vic annually from 2027, commissioning 4 early career writers. This will become a students of BSA Scriptwriting Festival in 2030 with the first third year cohort. The programme also connects with Channel 4 Bristol and with the BBC Writers Room and with a pool of film and TV writers we are assembling from our contacts in the US and UK. It focuses on delivering the intellectual, social and cultural underpinning of dramatic writing, the ability to navigate the technical frameworks required of stage screen and new media writing and the collaborative skills required of writing in any dramatic medium. Year 1 provides an introduction to the foundations of dramatic writing and begins with an immersive module that sets out the expectations of undergraduate study and the ways in which the programme will work. It focuses on how the writer finds a voice through their unique perspective on the world. The programme then moves on to explore the core principles of dramatic writing character, visual and textual storytelling and where they meet and diverge across different mediums of dramatic writing. Year 2 examines how these core principles work in Theatre, Film and Television and how the writer must manage the technical frameworks of each medium. Students are able to select from a menu of optional modules ranging from Writing for Games to Comedy and Creative Documentary to LGBT Perspectives. The year ends with a placement in one of BSA’s partner organisations allowing the student to select their area of special interest. Year 3 begins with an introduction to career development and opportunities in the creative industries and an exploration of collaboration a practical writing project in which the student works with a director, producer or script editor. The year then focuses on students producing 3 scripts. The first is a short form commission which students decide with their tutor, responding to a brief for a short film or short play. Those are all produced by BSA. The second is an independent writing project in which students are encouraged to write for a medium outside their primary area of interest. The final script is in the student’s primary area of interest and is workshopped or produced by BSA.