Creating Compelling Characters

Barbara Nanceis a professional screenwriter with over twenty-five years of experience in the entertainment industry in Los Angeles. Her series credits include Threshold (CBS), Blade (Spike), Flashforward (ABC), In Plain Sight (USA), House of Lies (Showtime), and The Lizzie Bordon Chronicles (Lifetime). In 2019, she wrote the screenplay for the well-known film I was Lorena (Lifetime), for which she won the Canadian Screen Award for Best Screenplay for a Television Movie. Her second film for Lifetime, which explores sexual abuse in the Amish community, has already been completed and will premiere in October. Additionally, from 2016 to 2021, Barbara was a professor of practice at the University of Southern California, where she taught scriptwriting, primarily in drama. She has been a frequent guest lecturer at Stevens College and has taught a television writing course at her alma mater in Paris, France. She has consulted for Amazon International, conducting development workshops for professional writers in Brazil, Mexico and India. As a consultant to Netflix's Grow Creative Initiative, she has conducted workshops for both students and professional writers in France, Italy, Poland, and Saudi Arabia. Before her career as a screenwriter, Barbara was a software analyst. She graduated from the American University in Paris with a bachelor's degree in computer science.

Session description:Creating attractive characters. You create people, so you need to understand the souls of your characters. We will explore the basics of character development. What affects the character? What makes them false, massive, believable? We will discuss the formation of the character's background, what their inner and outer needs and desires are, and what drives them in the pilot and in the show. Essentially, why are they compelling characters? We'll analyze complex, oversized characters from various TV shows to see how this is done successfully.