ENC 3402 - Spring 2026 - Cogswell

This course will take students through the whole soup-to-nuts of story development, pitch, outline, and three-stage synopsis to completion of the first iteration of a feature-length screenplay in Final Draft. We’ll start with Robert McKee’s classic method blunderbuss Story, and read the authors he cites, Aristotle and Stanislavsky - and through the latter, Dickens - and screen some essential films embodying important movements in the form, from Méliès through the revolutionary 70s, to the strange and exciting moment we are in.