1 Year Screenwriting Program

The Screenwriting Specialisation Programme at WWI is, in many ways, a unique professional training programme. Its overriding objective is to prepare students to become professional screenwriters with a deep understanding of the craft, empowering them to write on a range of topics in varied genres for Indian as well as international cinema. Students are also trained to write for other mass media and narrative formats such as television (fiction, game shows, talk shows, news segments, and the like), documentaries, advertising and corporate films. Since the demand for competent screenwriters in the Indian film and television industry far outstrips supply, students successfully completing this intensive training programme will hold a considerable advantage in the profession.

Cinema and television are essentially mediums for telling stories. The training at Whistling Woods International amalgamates the strengths of diverse story-telling models from around the world while educating a student in writing for popular Indian cinema. In that, Whistling Woods offers broad creative space to students and encourages them to explore their individuality, discover their own talent for telling stories, and develop their own narrative styles. Students become familiar with the universal principles of story-telling, including those underlying the myths, fables and classics that have stood the test of time across cultures. This, combined with intensive training in modern screenwriting principles forms the bulk of their instruction.

Students learn through theory lectures, workshops, motion picture viewing and script-analysis and interaction with professional screenwriters.

However, regular writing is the main thrust and purpose of the programme, providing students with the creative challenges and satisfaction that come with being writers. Self-discipline and productivity are constantly emphasised. By the end of the programme, each screenwriting student emerges with one original script, one script on a story assigned by a professional producer, one treatment for an original script, one treatment adapted from a literary work, a complete proposal for a TV programme (with scripts for two episodes and a story line for 52 episodes), and optionally a script for an commercial or a documentary.