Advanced Screenwriting – ONLINE

Ready to take your screenwriting to the next level?

This affordable four-week Advanced Screenwriting online course is designed for writers who already understand the basics and want to deepen their craft and refine their voice. Working alongside established screenwriters, you’ll develop the tools needed to build more compelling, professional-level scripts.

The course will cover the following topics – but will be also open to input from the students:

• Narrative Structure Continued – moving on from the basics to writing inciting incidents that work, building conflict, writing effective climaxes and resolutions etc.
• The Language of Cinema – visual storytelling, showing not telling, film grammar, image and meaning.
• Genre and Storyworld – understanding genre conventions and audience expectations, designing story worlds that emphasise your central theme and conflict, choosing the details that create a world in the reader’s mind)
• Professional formatting and the mechanics of scriptwriting (types of scene writing, layout, industry standards, individual style etc)

The course is led by Sophie McVeigh. Originally from Coventry in the West Midlands, Sophie McVeigh graduated with Distinction from the London Film School’s Screenwriting MA in 2017 and went on to be selected for the inaugural Canneseries Institute writers residency in 2018, where she developed a comedy-drama pilot and series bible in conjunction with Canal+ and Vivendi. Having previously lived and worked in Seville and Paris, she is interested in stories with a European connection, and currently works across TV and film on a wide variety of international projects and co-productions.

Current projects include Baller, a short film exploring themes of disability and toxic positivity online with director Andrew Keresztes, which won the 2025 Slick Films Fund £10,000 prize and has been selected for the 2025 BFI NETWORK London script lab; Rented Rooms, a feature film commissioned by ISB Films in Madrid set between Poland and Benidorm; the Cyprus-set ‘med-noir’ crime thriller series Farpoint, which is in development with ZDF Studios, Splash Screen, Three River Fiction and CYTA, and was recently selected for MIA’s Drama Pitching Forum in Rome; and psychological drama series, It Could Have Been Us, with Mainstreet Pictures and co-writer Peter-Adrian Altini. Alongside multi-award winning writer/director Nishchaya Gera, Sophie has recently written a novel based on their feature film script, The Taj Motel, which explores themes of immigration and sexuality and was selected for TorinoLabs Extended Film, and she has also been commissioned by Soi Books to write a graphic novel, Cimarron, based on the life of the explorer Dwayne Fields.

Sophie teaches MA Screenwriting and supervises short films on the MA Filmmaking program at the University of East London, and previously taught the undergraduate Introduction to Screenwriting course at The University of Manchester. She is a mentor to MA Screenwriting students at London Film School and The University of Manchester.