Kelli McGraw

Recently I stumbled across two sites that I found really interesting, both associated with people working with AFTRS (Australian Film Television and Radio School).  I thought I would share them here.

The first is Screen Culture:

Welcome to Screenculture.net, a site for anyone interested in ideas and how they impact on our screen stories, screen production and screen industry.

Here you will find regular posts from Dr Karen Pearlman, Dr Matthew Campora and Mike Jones, the Screen Studies Department of AFTRS, Australia’s national screen school. You will also be able to access information about some of the research projects going on at AFTRS in our Graduate Certificate in Screen Culture, our Masters by Research, and from 2011, our new Graduate Certificate in Webisodes. The students in these courses blog, too, and we are collecting a blog roll of other interesting sites – let us know if you would like to link. There are four key objectives of this site:

• expanding and influencing discussion of screen culture
• representing the thinking going on in and around the AFTRS Screen Studies department
• making provocations to catalyse action
• distributing new knowledge to industry

and we welcome you to engage with all of them!

The blog post I read on screenculture.net was by Mike Jones, about Genre and Computer Games.

The second site is Cracking Yarns:

Cracking Yarns is dedicated to making moving pictures – films that make us laugh and make us cry. We strive to create – and help others create – films with broad appeal that don’t insult the intelligence. Films like Dead Poets Society, Little Miss Sunshineand Groundhog Day. That’s why the focus here, as the name suggests, is on story. The key to taking a movie audience on an emotionally satisfying journey is structure – yet it’s where 99% of screenplays falter. We’re passionate about story and we’re committed to sharing our knowledge so you get to fulfil your film-making ambitions – and the world gets to see more cracking good yarns.

The article I found interesting here, Why screenwriters should take the oral before the written, was about the importance of oral storytelling, and sharing stories e.g. screenplays aloud before writing them down.

Finally, in writing up this post and going back to Mike Jones’ blog, I have found a third site to point you to (his) and I recommend this article on Video Game Taxonomies.

Happy surfing!