7 News Belize

Scriptwriting: The Art Of Storytelling
posted (July 16, 2010)
The Belize international film festival kicks off tonight and the seminars and workshops that accompany it start tomorrow in Cayo.

First up is the Art of Screenwriting facilitated by Professor Abiyi R. Ford. He's got a long and spectacular resume including teaching at Columbia University, Howard University and the George Mason University.

But he's not here tell his story; he wants to find out about Belizean stories and he told us why screenwriting is really about the art of storytelling:..

Professor Abiyi R. Ford
"You may not write screen plays but you tell a lot of stories and you have a lot of stories to tell. Screen writing is only one model one formula that facilitates that storytelling, and helps you to sort or organize your stories to be told through the moving image and that's the trick right there."

Jules Vasquez
"The people you love in a film and the people you hate, those people are actually constructs of the screen writer?"

Professor Abiyi R. Ford
"They are constructs of the screen writer but they are large pieces of real life, someone people in the audience in one way or the other knows or is familiar with or has heard about."

Jules Vasquez
"Do you think that good, great, relevant stories can come out of Belize?"

Professor Abiyi R. Ford
"Absolutely undoubtedly, Belize, Belizeans are people, they their history, they have a past they have a present; they have aspirations for the future, a lot of dynamics that have taken place here in Belize. The history of Belize, the making of the people the variety, the diversity of the people, the topography, all of these thing are raw material to be molded and told to the rest of the world through the voice of a Belizean or Belizean voices, rather than having somebody from the outside come and tell the story of Belize the Belizeans will be able to use this powerful medium of cinema to speak to world and introduce themselves to the rest of the world at the same time entertaining themselves."

The workshop starts tomorrow at 9:00 at the Ka'ana Resort outside San Jose Succotz.

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