Introduction to Screen Narrative: Perspectives on Story Production and Comprehension

Bringing together the expertise of world-leading screenwriters and scholars, this book offers a comprehensive overview of how screen narratives work. Exploring a variety of mediums including feature films, television, animation, and video games, the volume provides a contextual overview of the form and applies this to the practice of screenwriting.

Featuring over 20 contributions, the volume surveys the art of screen narrative, and allows students and screenwriters to draw on crucial insights to further improve their screenwriting craft. Editors Paul Taberham and Catalina Iricinschi have curated a volume that spans a range of disciplines including screenwriting, film theory, philosophy and psychology with experience and expertise in storytelling, modern blockbusters, puzzle films and art cinema. Screenwriters interviewed include: Josh Weinstein (The Simpsons, Gravity Falls), David Greenberg (Stomping Ground, Used to Love Her), Evan Skolnick and Ioana Uricaru.

Ideal for students of Screenwriting and Screen Narrative as well as aspiring screenwriters wanting to provide theoretical context to their craft.

Paul Taberham is Associate Professor in Film and Animation Studies at the Arts University Bournemouth, UK. He is the author of Lessons in Perception: The Avant-Garde Filmmaker as Practical Psychologist (Berghahn, 2018) and the forthcoming Animated Visions: Theory, History and Aesthetics (Berghahn, 2024). He is also the co-editor of Cognitive Media Theory (Routledge, 2014) with Ted Nannicelli, and Experimental Animation: From Analogue to Digital (Routledge, 2019) with Miriam Harris and Lilly Husbands. Paul is a fellow of the Society of Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image, and on the editorial board for Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal.

Catalina Iricinschi is Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology at Franklin & Marshall College. Research interests include event segmentation in film narrative, eye tracking in narrative processing, narrative of belonging and displacement, place and space depiction in film narrative, and Romanian cinema. She has published in journals such as Cognitive Science, Projections: The Journal for Movie and Mind, I-Perception, along with the edited anthologies Space in Language and the forthcoming Narrative, Media and Cognition.