zoom – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

Flipping Your Classroom with Dr. Rosanne Welch – Screenwriting Research Network Working Group on Comparative Screenwriting [Video]

Many thanks to SRN member Romana Turina for inviting me to give an online seminar on the benefits of Flipping Your Classroom for the Working Group on Comparative Screenwriting in the Screenwriting Research Network that she leads.

Every month she presents and records a guest lecture for our membership that is then open to the public once she posts it on YouTube.

This month she asked me to speak about the pedagogy of flipping your classroom to enhance learning which, while created with K-12 students in mind is equally effective – and I would add necessary – in the world of MFA candidates. I use this practice in the teaching of screenwriting in our low residency Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting.

It involves the professor providing less “Sage on the stage” performance and more student-focused opportunities. I’ve also come to describe it as not teaching (as defined by dumping all my info into their heads) but as curating an experience from which they glean the knowledge they need.

In the lecture I give examples of the kinds of activities I curate, keeping in mind the different learning styles each MFA candidate presents.

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Dr. Rosanne Welch Moderates “More Than Queens and Crowns: Writing Female-Focused Historical Fiction” – Friday, January 7, 2022 – Writers Guild Foundation

Whenever I plan one of the Writers Guild Foundation panels that I host during our MFA Workshop I look for things I’m interested in hearing more about. As I’ve enjoyed a few historical pieces recently it made sense to do a panel of writers in that genre.

RMW Rosanne Signature for Web

Previous panel at the Writer Guild

More Than Queens and Crowns: Writing Female-Focused Historical Fiction
Friday, January 7, 2022
4:00 PM 5:30 PM
Zoom webinar

The WGF and Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting team up for a virtual conversation on writing female-focused historical fiction TV series.

Whether the show takes place in 18th century England or the American suburbs of the 1960s, we ask TV writers and producers about their process for researching various eras, the creative decisions behind stories about real-life people and events, their experiences adapting from novels and literary works, and other lessons learned while writing in the genre.

Panelists:

Amberia Allen – Writer and Story Editor, The Wonder Years
Danielle Berrow – Writer and Executive Story Editor, Outlander
Robbie Macdonald – Writer and Executive Producer, Dickinson

Stay tuned for more panelist announcements!

Moderated by Dr. Rosanne Welch, Director of Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting.

Panel starts at 4:00pm Pacific time.

Space is limited so RSVP now. After signing up, you’ll receive information on how to access the Zoom panel.

If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us at events@wgfoundation.org.

Watch this presentation on “When Women Wrote Hollywood” for the Empire State Center for the Book [Video] (1 hour)

MFA Executive Director Dr. Rosanne Welch gave a Zoom presentation on“When Women Wrote Hollywood” for the Empire State Center for the Book, the New York State affiliate of the Library of Congress Center for the Book.

Dr. Welch discussed many highly successful female screenwriters of early Hollywood and explained why they don’t appear in most mainstream histories of the era.

The essays in this book were written by the alumni of the inaugural class of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting and come from the stories of the many brilliant female screenwriters studied in our History of Screenwriting courses and collected into When Women Wrote Hollywood.

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A professor’s work is never done via Instagram

I promised to clean my desk before a full semester of online learning began… and I did. See? There’s room for my cat Spotted Leaf (named after a character in the Erin Hunter series of books about cats who live in the woods – Warriors). Spot (as we call her for short) enjoys hearing me talk to students about everything from films to fiction. Maybe in one of her past 9 lives she was a humanities professor, too!

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Staged review – Michael Sheen and David Tennant get meta via The Guardian

Why are the Brits so much better about creativity in challenging technological times – AND at making fun of themselves? In this short Zoom-filmed set of 15 minute shorts we find Tennant and Sheen (of Good Omens) playing exaggerated versions of themselves as two actors who are forced to rehearse an upcoming play (Pirandello’s “6 Characters in Search of an Author”) on Zoom due to the lockdown. — Rosanne

It is not, overall, a great time to be an actor. Or a director, or a musician, or a writer for the stage or indeed almost anyone involved in the creative arts. The practical effects of the pandemic – and its gross mismanagement – on planned productions (postponed indefinitely), theatre finances (which depend on packed, not socially distanced, houses) and freedom to gather, rehearse, collaborate and generate ideas are already being felt, but their ramifications have hardly begun.

Individual actors have found ways to continue to provide entertainment and add to the cultural conversation (Samuel West, for example, began a series of beautiful and restorative poetry readings requested by followers on his Twitter account, to which more and more actors have added their voices as the weeks have passed), but the brightest chink of light in the darkness so far, and reaching the widest audience, has been offered by the small screen.

Read Staged review – Michael Sheen and David Tennant get meta via The Guardian