The Hidden Patterns of the New Hit TV Hour Pilot Stories In 2016

ABOUT THE WEBINAR

Want to learn how to use today's super-charged Plots, Acts, and Story Beats of TV pilots (they've changed from just five years ago!) to wow your audience and sell your pilot? It's how pros IMPROVE their scripts—and it's critical knowledge if you want to sell your story to Hollywood, in this blazing new golden age of TV story.

Look at the amazing original, trail-blazing stories in TV today! Yet ALL great TV pilots (and every episode that comes after) follow a similar hidden patterns and rhythms—just like a great pop song always has a bridge, a chorus and verses. No exceptions. You can't write a great pop song without using these patterns—but we see people try to write TV shows all the time not knowing them. Whether you're writing for network or the hippest Internet platform. Giving your cool, original TV series pilot the right rhythm is the key to selling it—because it's the key to the audience's pleasure.

If you've already written a script but can't sell it, you'll be amazed at how learning these things will help you improve it.

Not only that—these structures have changed in the last five years, due to TV's amazing explosion of form and content. (For example, the actual amount of time for a 'Beat' of TV today can be half what it was five years ago. (Blame our dwindling attention span.)

Finally, if you don't understand how the A/B/C/D/E plots all weave in and out of your pilot, and which plots are presented first (example—your Cold Open nearly always is about the A and B storyline)—your story just isn't going to work as a commercial television show—regardless of how hip and original your ideas. (The hipsters in the newest, most original TV stories still use ALL these forms, too, by the way, it's part of their success.) Knowing this will also help you FINISH your pilot way faster—you won't spin your wheels writing an anarchical structure that goes nowhere. Make no mistake; every great TV professional follows these very powerful forms (even when they bend them, they KNOW them and use them)—from Mike Judge, Vince Gilligan to Nic Pizzollato to Peter Straughan & P. Kominsky, Jenji Kohan, and Frank Spotnitz. This Webinar uses JESSICA JONES, MR. ROBOT, WOLF HALL & BREAKING BAD as a one-hour drama model and SILICON VALLEY and HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER as a half hour comedy model.

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN:

• How to use the same structure Gilligan, Sorkin, Pizzollato, Spotnitz, Straughan and Kohan do to make a great hidden rhythm for your audience's pleasure (second rate TV stories don't do this)
• Create powerful four, five and six act TV structures for your 'cool' pilot
• How many Beats? Where do they go into each Act? How to vary this to give your story more power
• Create 'lightning bolt' character surprise in your Acts (it's not just cliffhangers)
• Squeezing emotion! Through a BMMOC structure. You'll learn that BMMOC (the crescendos in every great episode) is the key to how an audience responds to a character
• Creating a powerful Beat—why it's at the center of every great TV story
• How Internet TV studios are changing the narrative form and how to write for them

WHO SHOULD LISTEN?

• Beginning TV Writers who want to sell and don't know TV plot structure
• Professional writers who want to go deeper into structure
• Producers who shape TV stories into beats and patterns
• Directors and editors who want powerful shaping skills
• Creative rule-breakers who want to understand the forms so they can bend them
• Actors who desire to understand when to power up their performance in each Beat
• Writers with fabulous ideas but no idea how plot works in the new TV story (don't be embarrassed, a lot of pros don't either)