In April, 2014 my essay on multimodal writing (with co-author Alex Munt) was published in John Pott’s edited collection for Palgrave Pivot The Future of Writing. The book, which comes out of a symposium on this topic held at Macquarie University with the support of the Copyright Agency, features essays by John, Peter Doyle, Catharine Lumby, Richard Nash, Nigel Krauth and others.
Earlier this year, my book Screenwriting in a Digital Era was published by Palgrave Macmillan. I aimed to examine a range of practices for writing for the screen. Looking back to prehistories of the form, my book links screenwriting and visual storytelling to visual and oral storytelling. From the shadow playwrights of twelfth-century Europe to semi-improvised ensemble films played out on the streets of cities around the globe. Looking to the future, Screenwriting in a Digital Era examines the blurring of genres, production stages and roles in digital ecologies and the practices of sustainable screenwriting.
Adrian Martin (Goethe University, Germany) wrote:
‘Kathryn Millard’s brilliant book asks: what is involved in writing for the screen in a digital era? Surely much more than just words on a page. With images, sounds, fragments of story, impressions of place and research materials, we improvise, perform, assemble, re-mix on our computers. We project our imagination into the world (real or otherwise) that we hope to capture on screen. Conventional accounts of screenwriting find the classic story templates wherever they look; Millard, by contrast, finds the ‘seeds of the new’ everywhere in the experiments of the past. Hers is the first truly international survey to look beyond Hollywood for its rich and varied inspiration. It is a book for the future of cinema and all screen media’.
Playlab recently published Noelle Janaczewska’s script Mrs Petrov’s Shoe (winner of the Queensland Premiers Literary Award 2006). I was Dramaturg on Noelle’s inventive play about cultural identity and literary scandals. Check it out here.
Kathryn Millard 