Lights, Camera, Action (Writing)!

  • Saturday, April 13, 2024 / 9:00 AM (PDT)
  • Carsey-Wolf Center
  • With Milla Bell-Hart, Annie Julia Wyman
  • Wallis Annenberg Conference Room (SSMS 4315)
    A Storytelling for the Screen weekend workshop

“The Battle of the Bastards,” the True Detective one-shot, Squid Games’ tug-of-war: some of the most indelible moments in recent television spring not from dialogue, but from action. In this new Storytelling for the Screen workshop led by television writers Annie Julia Wyman (The Chair, Tokyo Vice) and Milla Bell-Hart (Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, Truth Be Told), you’ll have a unique chance to dissect these muscular sequences, study the action genre, and prepare your own action writing for professional settings.

Come prepared with wild ideas, dynamic characters, and an openness to take a swing at the most important part of every feature or television script: the first fifteen pages. Participants will work collaboratively and individually to explore how to make the tension, stakes, and emotion in their work explode off the page onto the screen.

Lights, Camera, Action (Writing)! will take place Saturday, April 13 from 9:30 AM to 4:00 PM. As this workshop will involve collaborative work with fellow participants, applicants should be able to commit to the entirety of the workshop. This workshop is open to all UCSB undergraduate students by application only. In their applications, prospective participants should provide an explanation of how this workshop will support their professional development, as well as evidence of prior screenwriting experience (prior experience may include coursework at UCSB or elsewhere, professional experience, and/or other forms of screenwriting practice). Applications are due Wednesday, April 3. Applicants will be notified of admission no later than Monday, April 8. 

Applications must be received by midnight on Wednesday, April 3 to receive full consideration.

About the instructors:

Photography by Molly Haley, mollyhaley.com

Milla Bell-Hart

Milla Bell-Hart is an action writer who folds progressive content into accessible, commercial genre spaces. Milla hails from small-town Maine, graduated from Wesleyan University, and got her start in LA working in grip and electrical departments. She was most recently a Co-EP on Apple’s live action Godzilla series, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. She’s staffed on NBC’s The Night Shift, Amazon’s dark thriller Absentia, Netflix’s fantasy epic Diablo, Amazon’s dystopian actioner Lazarus, Apple’s murder mystery Truth Be Told, and Apple’s crime caper Bad Monkey. She’s currently developing a true crime hour-long with Bill Lawrence’s Doozer Productions, Warner Brothers, and Annie Murphy. She’s set up a demolition derby pilot Female Driven at the CW and a Coast Guard pilot at Fox. In the feature space, Milla rewrote surf epic Rio Pro for Netflix and Makeready. Prior to that, she polished Star Thrower’s dystopian motorcycle feature Godspeed. Her favorite movie is Die Hard, her favorite person is Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and her least favorite flavor rhymes with her name: vanilla.

AnnieWyman_Headshot

Annie Julia Wyman

Annie Julia Wyman is the co-creator of Netflix’s The Chair and has created for the executive producers of Game of Thrones, Seinfeld, Mrs. America, Station Eleven, Atlanta, Our Flag Means Death, Reservation Dogs and others. She has written on Tokyo Vice (HBO Max) and Welcome to Chippendales (Hulu), and she is currently a co-executive producer on HBO’s A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: The Hedge Knight. Dr. Wyman holds a masters from Stanford and a doctorate from Harvard and has taught at Harvard, Bard, UCSB, and Claremont McKenna. She studies and teaches comedy as well as screenwriting and has lectured in Belgium, India, and elsewhere.

 This event is sponsored by the Rick Rosen Storytelling for the Screen Fund.