The Bachelor of Fine Arts (Screenwriting) provides an immersive and experiential studio-based education, focusing on the origination and development of stories for the screen. There is a strong emphasis on developing the your individual creative voice, while underlining the need to speak effectively and freshly to an audience. The course provides training in writing for different screen-based mediums and genres, as well as the creative adaptation of work originated in other mediums. Focus is placed upon writing to a high professional standard with a view to industry standards and markets, while developing you as a unique, resilient individual, both creatively and professionally.

Housed in the Film and Television department, this degree lives alongside the department’s other degrees in directing and producing for live-action fiction, animation and documentary. This provides you with the unique opportunity to develop professional collaboration skills and creative partnerships. This happens while developing creative concepts alone or in collaborative teams, while being on-set during productions, and through script readings and critical self and peer assessment.

The Bachelor of Fine Arts (Screenwriting) graduates complete a deeply personal, artistically transformational, and highly professional course of development. The course design actively encourages personal courage and resilience through enabling you to gradually build collaboration and networking skills, at first with other students and later with industry practitioners. With the creative, collaborative and technical skills gained you will optimally placed to make significant impact in the national and international creative industries.

Your breadth studies

As part of your course at each year level, you can select breadth subjects either from our VCA elective subjects, or explore cross disciplinary studies from the wider University community, accessing multi-disciplinary knowledge and skills that will build on existing knowledge or present opportunities for you to investigate and develop new interests.

The breadth subjects available to commencing BFA students include those in fine arts (acting, animation, dance, production, film and television, music theatre, screenwriting, theatre and visual art), as well as music education, Indigenous knowledges, law, languages, psychology, social sciences, humanities, science, marketing and many more.

Find out more about the University’s breadth subjects

Workload

You’ll be engaged in intensive, workshop based, on-campus training three to four days a week. This comprises teaching, studio practice, screenings and small group script development tutorials.