This thesis will explore the question: How, as a screenwriter, do you keep your audience engaged while maintaining truthful portrayals of youth in teen cinema?
The purpose of this thesis is to explore the ways in which youth have been represented and portrayed in cinema throughout history and the ways in which I have managed it myself in my own screenplay. I also wanted to look at the practical side of writing with how to keep an audience engaged and examine how well I managed that through my own writing.
In the thesis, I look specifically at the work of Timothy Shary to examine the ways in which cinema has presented the youth as his work in particular helped to inspire and shape my own ideas and how I wrote my characters. I put more focus on the construction of characters because of the nature of my screenplay being more character focused. This focus on how to write my characters links to the second half of the thesis which focuses more on the practical side of writing and how to keep an audience engaged in your film. To explore this, I looked more specifically at elements such as the structure, characters, and dialogue. For the research into this topic, I looked mostly at Sublett and Ballon to support my work.
I used my own experiences writing my first feature screenplay to inform my ideas for this thesis and am analysing aspects of my screenplay in order to help my examination and investigation into my research topics.
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