Semiotics for Screenwriters: Using Semiotics to Break Down Your Favorite Films, Then Write Your Own Screenplay

＂You’re trying to finish a screenplay, but there’s a voice in your ear whispering, ＂You should know more about how cinema story works.＂ Perhaps you’ve heard how many successful screenwriters deconstruct or ＂break down＂ films and study them. You’d like to try this method but ask yourself, ＂How do I start?＂ Semiotics for Screenwriters can help you with this daunting task by taking you on a unique journey through 3 classic films - It’s a Wonderful Life, Lost in Translation, and Get Out - that shows you the hidden universal language of plot, character, and theme at work in them. This method will reveal the mechanics of cinema story, then show you how to apply this knowledge to your own screenwriting. Semiotics is a powerful system of analysis applied in many fields, including literature and psychology. In this book you’ll learn to deploy this method to break down classic films then apply it to writing, developing and correcting your own screenplays.＂

Michael Tierno is Associate Professor of Film and Video Production at East Carolina State University, USA. He is the author of Aristotle’s Poetics for Screenwriters (2002) and Location and Postproduction Sound for Low-Budget Filmmakers (2020). He is also an award-winning writer/director of the feature films Auditions, Nocturne and Through a Class Darkly.