Power, Gender & New Story Structures

a 2-day workshop with Stephen Cleary

Split into single-gender groups, people tell stories differently. Men often tell stories with all-male characters. Women rarely tell stories with all-female characters. Women together tend to maintain a theme across their stories. Men don’t. Women talk less. Men reveal less about themselves.

Gender variations within storytelling matter. Our understanding of screenwriting mostly comes from work done by men trying to figure out how the stories they told worked. The vast majority of those stories centred on male characters who were powerful or had access to power.This workshop is about characters who aren’t male and powerful. How do you dramatise their stories, those characters, to make them compulsive? How do you tell stories about people who struggle for power, or who will never have power? Does power work differently for male and female characters (answer: yes)? How?

Come to this workshop and find out, and with any luck change how you think about story structure, forever.

WELLINGTON Dates: 7 - 8  Dec 2019

Venue:  Hunter Building Lecture Theatre 119 (HULT119), Victoria University, Kelburn Parade, Wellington

Cost: $250 (+ GST). Tickets available via Eventbrite. 

What to Bring: Pen and paper. Morning and afternoon tea will be provided. BYO Lunch. 

This workshop is presented in partnership with Victoria University of Wellington.

ABOUT STEPHEN CLEARY

Stephen Cleary has been a film and television professional for over twenty years, working in Europe, North America, and Australasia, with occasional forays into Asia. He has worked as a feature producer, television producer/director, educator, and screenwriter. He has developed many feature films from inception to production. Many have won international festival prizes including Venice Golden Lion-winning feature Sweet Country. He was the lead consultant on the Emmy Award-winning feature documentary What Happened Miss Simone? and conceived and produced Filmlab in South Australia, a program designed to develop a base of local production companies. He ran Arista, Europe’s largest private story development agency for 11 years. Currently, he is an adjunct professor at the film school of the Victoria College of the Arts, Melbourne and a regular lecturer at the Danish Film School, the National Film School of the UK and AFTRS. All on aspects of story development.