A woman, who believes she is terminally ill, hires a man to kill her, believing that's the only way for her to escape a drawn-out, painful death while still allowing her husband to collect on life insurance. But soon after hiring the man, she realizes she's not dying, that she's been set-up.

In this feature screenplay, I have incorporated the complexities of an intertwining multi-strand narrative, while manipulating the materials of time and space. This has enabled me to begin my exploration into finding a suitable structure in which to tell a story that features a number of characters, all of whom are intended to represent some of human nature's darkest emotions. I have attempted to distinguish my script from the standard three-act structure. However, I do believe it is a fundamental requirement to know all the rules of a classical three-act structure in order to subvert its conventions. The three-act structure has long been a successful model for transmitting a story to the screen. It has provided the basis for many a film where a character triumphs over adversity; where good defeats bad and heroes fall in love. But what about characters that are not heroes? Protagonists who cannot be defined under the even broadest definition of heroism? Can these people thrive within the strict guidelines of a three-act structure, with its strong reliance on a hero's journey? Is there an alternative structure that can deal with these characters, a structure that can incorporate them in a narrative? This MA will attempt to answer these questions, while also investigating if the materials of time and space can be manipulated and understood when working outside the guidelines of a formulaic structure. The materials of time and space are unique to all films and they are both dealt with in different ways by screenwriters and filmmakers alike. Temporal and spatial characteristics have been studied in depth by many critics including, of particular importance to this MA, David Bordwell. Bordwell has used time and space as a way of making sense of narrative and of engaging with a film. This is something that I am attempting to achieve in the following script and commentary. Furthermore, I will try to articulate the manipulation of time and space, with the challenges of multiple strands of narrative and multiple protagonists.

In this thesis report I describe in detail the conception of a fictional story set in present-day Florida and the Caribbean and its development as a screenplay, the University of Texas Graduate School learning environment that facilitated this writing exercise, and my reflections on the MFA process as a whole. / text

This report details the writing process that led to “Nature Red,” a screenplay about an aging hippy with a successful farm co-op whose dark past comes back to haunt him in the form of a sociopathic drifter. I begin with the inspirations for this story. Then I discuss the “story-breaking” process, pre-writing, drafting, and revising. I will discuss what I learned about the story’s subject matter as well as what I learned about storytelling for film. Included are samples of prewriting and revision materials. / text

A father addicted to gambling returns home after 13 years and has to pick up the shattered pieces of his failed relationships.

This report documents the creative process that resulted in the feature screenplay "Magic Mountain," including the first inspiration for a dramatic thriller, initial attempts to devise character and plot, writing and rewriting script pages, and then the radical change of genre and artistic intention toward surrealist comedy, culminating with the final sequence of rewriting during the thesis semester. / text

Jacob Hawke, a documentary photographer, returns to his long forsaken West Virginia hometown roots to document the activities of a Christian serpent handling church, of which his father is pastor. Jacob, a non-believer, is caught in an emotional vortex consisting of his hatred for his father (whom he abandoned after his mother was killed in a serpent-handling incident) and his growing attraction to Minnie, an enigmatic member of the Signs Following Church. Jacob is slowly lured by the strength of faith demonstrated by the community and must come to terms with his relationship with his father and make a crucial decision about his future.

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The following thesis is adapted from screenplay format. The document from which it derives serves as a shooting script for a film/video called A World Without You . The shooting script contains explicit scene description, camera set-ups that include angle and lens choices, dialog, and transitions - all the relevant instruction needed for anyone to reproduce the film with explicit similarity to its original. The thesis reflects a series of short videos I completed as research. In their finished state, the series of videos coalesce to a single film/video with a sixty-two-minute running time. That conglomeration emerged as a “shadow” or “inversion” of a twenty-minute, singlechannel video loop called Intermission For Deleted Acts, which served as centerpiece to my thesis exhibition. The script navigates themes of environmental catastrophe, companionship, survival, surveillance, and art practice. The following thesis attempts to keep the screenplay formatting intact to communicate both its functionality and aesthetic quality.

This Master of Arts project in Creative Writing was submitted to the School of Creative Media at Royal Melbourne University of Technology. It contains a full length feature screenplay for an un-produced road movie entitled Free Radicals. It is primarily a dark love story between the drug-addicted rent boy Roman and the budding actor, the protagonist Jonathan. It is however written in a conventional structure familiar to Hollywood professionals, and a good deal of humour is used to attract interest in the story. The storyline itself is more familiar to the audience of road movies and independent features in the US or European Art House ventures. The exegesis explores the history and the conventions of the road movie genre, in addition to the established and not often debated conventions of screenwriting theory. The thesis attempts to show how these theories were applied to the screenplay and how they influenced the process of writing it within an academic and commercial context. The MA project shows how different expectations may create a conflict in the personal writing process and inspire a product that makes compromises. The reason for reading this project may not only be the product itself but also the insight it offers into a screenwriting profession where it is often important to meet expectations.