LAFAYETTE TODAY
Telling Stories
Writing screenplays in a new course taught by Alix Ohlin, assistant professor of English, Kelly Barrows ’06 chose as her protagonist a young girl masking drug addiction and a difficult family life with academic and social success while Sandra Welch ’06 chronicled the life of a recent college graduate struggling with issues of identity, domestic violence, and race. Drawing on personal experience, Ryan Rodden ’06 came up with a comedy about a youngster’s first day working in a supermarket.
Ohlin’s screenwriting students explored the basic elements of the writer’s craft and examined the Hollywood tradition. They teamed up to film scenes, to understand how words translate to the screen, and studied popular movies’ narrative structure, character development, imagery, genre expectations, and differences between the screenplay and finished film.
“I hope they take away a practical understanding of the way stories are told, visually and dramatically,” Ohlin says. “I try to raise their awareness of the conventions that govern American movies, which most of us absorb without analyzing.”
Barrows, an American studies graduate, enjoyed sharing ideas with fellow writers and felt it improved her work. “I learned that subtext and images in a film are more important than the written text,” says Welch, an English and government & law graduate,
who plans to teach English and drama in secondary school.
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