Screenwriting: Students tell stories through creative writing

The following post was written by Kate LaGatta ’25 as part of her Senior Experience with Beaver’s Marketing department.

Lights! Camera! Writing…? For students in Beaver’s screenwriting class, creativity flies high. The 11th and 12th grade elective is incredibly special, being one of the few classes to focus primarily on creative writing. With three projects serving as the structure of the course and an additional honors level option, the class gives an insightful look into the world of screenwriting.

I took this course during my senior year, and it turned out to be one of the best classes I’ve ever taken at Beaver. Mr. Eaton began the course by teaching us the mechanics of screenwriting through observation and a traditional lesson format. After we had the basics down, our first project was to reverse engineer a scene from a movie we were familiar with.

Following the reverse engineering assignment, we looked at short films and how to condense an entire film arc within ten to twelve minutes. My film focused on a regular guy suffering from a mid-life crisis vacationing on Route 66 before he meets a cult that’s a cross between Manson and the Bible. Owen Eddy ‘25 liked the short films the most, saying he loved that “you actually got to write scripts”.

For our final project, we each created a TV Bible, which is a compilation of character intros, episode layouts, the first few pages of a pilot episode, and all other materials used to pitch TV shows. After we finished, we had a showcase of our diverse concepts. One student wrote a diner version of The Office, while another featured an international government agency in a sci-fi world. There was even a show based entirely around a horse camp for girls during the summer.

“In English, in general, there’s rarely a single right or wrong answer”, Mr. Eaton explains. The class, he says, “is more feedback-based” instead of moderating what’s proper and what’s not. “It’s a challenge for me as a teacher,” Mr. Eaton says.

The emphasis on feedback improved my writing and allowed my creativity to grow. This course is directly responsible for my continued interest in screenwriting, to the extent that I have submitted my short film to a few film festivals.

“I would recommend this class to others,” says Owen. “I think it’s fun and a good experience.”