IN PERSON The Adaptation Experiment
8 Weeks | Thursdays | Begins April 24, 2025 | 7pm-9pm MT
Instructor: Jason Long
MEMBER PRICE: $300.00
NON-MEMBER PRICE: $400.00
An 8-week odyssey through the messy, frustrating, vague, yet sometimes delightful world of screenplay adaptation. Learn the basics of screenplay craft - from formatting to structure to rising action and conflict - while also learning a variety of strategies, the secret sauces, of adapting short stories into scripts for the screen.
All participants will be given the same short story from an anonymous author. With guidance and encouragement from your facilitator, you are tasked with reimagining that piece of prose and turning it into a short, messy, ambiguous, wart-filled first draft.
Let's end off in a pub or cafe or book store or speakeasy or heated garage, read these works of art aloud, and compare your interpretation of the short story with the rest of your participants. Oh, and the short story author will show up, reveal themselves, and listen in.
This class takes place in person at the Alexandra Writers’ Centre in Calgary.
Jason Long has been writing for film and theatre in Canada for over six hundred years. He's co-written four feature films, written and directed a couple of shorts, and has worked tirelessly for four plus years to convince an incredibly skittish neighbourhood cat to like him.
Jason is (still!) an instructor in the film department at the SAIT. He has previously facilitated screenwriting workshops with organizations such as Company of Rogue Actors' Studio, Alexandra Writers' Centre Society, NUTV, and the Calgary Society of Independent Filmmakers.
He is also a sometimes-stand up comedian and actor, having played various creeps and weirdos in many series and films, including The Abandons, Wyonna Earp, The Order, Dead Again in Tombstone, and Young Drunk Punk.
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We are a community that thrives on support and encouragement. Based on the philosophy of "no writer left behind", the J. Michael Fay Subsidy Program is available to anyone who finds themselves in financial need but really wants or needs to participate in one our programs are classes. Click link above for more details and to apply.
