CFP: 11th Screenwriting Research Network conference

CALL FOR PAPERS

11th Screenwriting Research Network (SRN) International Conference 
Topic: Writing for cinema. Writing for TV 

Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan.
Thursday, September 13th to Saturday, September 15th, 2018.

 Abstracts due December 15, 2017

The main theme of the 2018 Screenwriting Research Network conference is the relationship between cinema and television storytelling. Once two separate worlds, cinema and television narratives are progressively becoming overlapping domains in terms of screenwriting techniques, development methods, careers, contents and audiences.

 If authorship, sophisticated drama, address to educated viewers, consideration by the critics had been for long the exclusive marks of stories written for the big screen, this is much less the case today. The cable channels and nowadays the streaming platforms revolution have led to series that have zeroed the distance from cinema artistic quality. Walls between careers have fallen, with prominent screenwriters like Aaron Sorkin, Paul Haggis, Stephen Knight and Steven Zaillian crossing borders between the two industries, writing for both media. Besides, the collaboration of a team of writers/authors in the development of a narrative idea — which is typical of the TV industry writers’ rooms — has started to become a valuable method also in the cinema industry, for example at Pixar, or when narrative potential of comic universes and properties are explored at a studio department as a possible material for franchises.

Yet, differences still exist — cinema is still a director’s medium, whilst TV is a writer’s medium, especially in the American industry that still has a very high share of the markets in any countries — and new ones have emerged — for example the specialization of cinema and TV storytelling in different kind of characters, with heroes and superheroes dominating the big screen, and so called “antiheroes” the TV series.

The conference intends to tackle these issues, discussing them from the wide range of theoretical approaches and professional angles related to the craft of screenwriting.

For a list of suggested topics and details for submission, see the conference website. The organising committee plans to notify acceptances/rejections by January 31, 2018.

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