There have been debates about whether a Christmas advert made for just £50 is better than the John Lewis £7m Christmas advert featuring Elton John. We know that budget doesn’t matter; it’s all about how you deliver story – so we’ve broken each advert down into their five acts.
Perfecting the structure of a story makes the difference between a good idea and a successful piece of screenwriting. In this one-to-one session, the John Yorke Story team work with a screenwriter as she masters some of the core elements of five-act structure: inciting incidents, moments of hope and despair, and the point of no return.
Ashley Pharoah, award-winning writer and creator of shows including Life on Mars, Ashes to Ashes and Wild at Heart, dropped by our classroom to take questions from our John Yorke Story for Screenwriting students. Here they discuss pitching, his development as a writer and the often long wait from script to screen.
You’ve written your story, now how can you test whether or not it’s as good as it can be? In Into the Woods and on his online courses John Yorke recommends asking 10 questions to check you’ve got your story straight: an approach as relevant to business, science, marketing and tech stories as it is to dramatic narratives.