The Format Page

Hearing & Moving & Seeing

Audio-Movies & Stage & Film

In multi-format, no matter what - every format begins with the story.

In all formats let the story begin to guide us, as it first leads us to create script-pages in Sonic Theatre/Radio-Cinema Drama/Audio Podcasts - as we learn to paint with sound.

Hints for self-learning about Writing in Audio... start listening everywhere you go.

Check out our various links in the Radio/Audio-Movies areas - lots to hear, as you desire. It's free-form. You aren't expected to memorize all this. It's just here to show various possibilities.

As well, on this site we keep various ways of learning format.

All of them come back to... Story - and, in Sound, we'll learn how the world creates pictures from pattern. Turns out that's what we do in every format we study.

Freedom of Study:

This art-form-craft-biz is your own learning place.

To all my former students, you may still reach me in the same way you did during workshops. Now that I've retired from formal teaching-mentoring at VIU - I'll also be giving free access to my web-books to all my former students.

This work is life-long, it does not have any endings except for the quite normal ones of mortality and access. As always, you find that you learn best at your own pace.

Remember that Sonics, Theatre & Film-TV are group-working areas, and we all write together - using different media - and access ideas. In our creative-journey it is all group-writing. More on that in the upcoming blog.

When you enter this virtual door, you acknowledge that you are a writer. This site, and our approach, is dedicated to a simple truth...

...everything begins with Your Story

So, right now, just click the "The Story" on our side index-bar & there's more to think about. We're all in a digital world - hurray! Welcome to Dendrite-narrative & Fuller-Narrative.

This is a "no-boss" approach.

O yes....how 2 Navigate:

As you follow a trail in this sister-site - here's a suggestion about getting back to where you were:

After you've clicked a link, and explored it, you may use the upper left arrow to get back to the page where you first clicked the link.

Why We Explore 3 Formats:

Knowing format allows us to share our stories & scripts in such a way that they leap from mind to mind in the form a story demands.

This is the true age of the hyphenate. We get to do it all. As you know, there are hundreds of books & articles about Format. However, my approach to format comes from using it.

This entire Introduction to drama covers three different formats. We do this in order to encourage the growing trend of all writers being familiar with related forms of expression.

The formats are pragmatic in every form. A production person can read a well-done script and estimate how to do the project from the pages provided.

Radio Plays, Stage-plays, and Film scripts unfold in the mind as if we turned on a radio, walked upon a working stage, or aimed our phone to start making our own movie, as sounds pulse past us. I'm now returning to the Sonic Realm where I began learning all this in Radio, and then CBC TV, and various independent titles, or series.

When you follow the wonder-filled power of the simple story - you realize that, in this age, ALL things are now possible.

This is one route to such an awareness, for this is a Web-Page-Book & free. It's not designed to be memorized and regurgitated - rather, it's about an exploration that's now possible for us all. And as we link everything in 'Dendrite-Narrative' style we creat many from one. And the more we learn multi-format the more we're ready for "Fuller-Narrative" when, Geodesic Dome style we inter-link many formats.

Let's follow the trail of our dreams.

We are all Pandemic & post-pandemic writers - this is one way to share what this era is teaching us.

We're all in this together.

If this intrigues you... we keep a site on becoming a person who works in a number of formats & also we may become part of the crew.

When I started learning, first in sonics at CBG Gander, & all other Announcer-Operators there taught me the beginning of working in sound.

Next, the crew in CBNT in St. John's taught me how to do the TV/Film work & I know, in my deepest thoughts, that things get done when all work together. I learned any of us is a natural multi-tasker. We do many things.

Be a Hyphenate..................... Here's the Link.... https://writersdirect.ca/

After "the story" begins .... we'll explore Radio Sounds / Sonic Movies. But this is a free-form web-site. You create your own path. Welcome to all writers.

We explore the power of the short film & radio show & one-act Plays.

The more we know about each format, the more we begin to learn about how scripts do their work.

As well we tap the power of group-learning so together we may all learn how to bring our stories to the world. We are the doulas of words..

Guess what -?-

- this is a kind of writing we don't do alone. We work deep into the night - and while we write, waiting to co-create with us are gathered a cinematographer with her camera & camera crew, sound recorder with her microphone and producers with their own dreams.

All performers help turn our characters into people - to go to the core of a writer's words and help them get it on speakers, screen, and living air and space and time shared with an audience.

Now - click our "The Story" link in the upper left sidebar. Those links will take you all over this site and also leads to other inter-connected explorations in the sites I maintain.

"The Story" is what will take you to your first assignment.

I now dedicate my free sites to vital people I've worked with in my life.

This first page is dedicated to Ros Davies, one of the multi-talented women who kept Creative Writing going, and saved Instructors again & again.

My profound thanks to Ros for help over the years at what was then Malaspina , and then transformed into VIU.

Happy retirement wishes to Ros & a joyful start of this next part of the trail.

TheFormatPage

Hearing & Moving & Seeing