Digital Platforms in Performance (edX)

This course is part of the University of Cambridge’s MicroMaster’s program in Writing for Performance and Entertainment Industries.

How can you utilize the innovative creative world of online digital platforms to advance and create new material as dramatic writers? We will be looking in-depth at how to find a digital form that stimulates you as a writer. Do you want to write interactive gameplay ‘script’ for the video game industry? Or learn how to write soundscapes for radio drama and podcast plays? Perhaps you want to create new content for your own YouTube channel? We will be looking at how narrative skill and digital production coincide in all these mediums.

We will consider successful professional examples of digital narratives; look deeply into the changing form of scriptwriting in the video game industry, as well as acquire knowledge of how to reach a target audience online. This is a comprehensive introduction to writing and innovating digital content.

Learning to write for online platforms, and how to communicate most effectively with an online audience, is now a highly transferable skill for any profession.

Digital expertise, flexible thinking, and expert storytelling abilities are now essential in a diversifying global job market - come and learn essential new skills, and have fun doing it!

You will be set writing exercises over the course of the module, and you will be asked to keep a brief creativity journal to note how your ideas progress and how your intuition leads you into productivity. By the end of this module, you will have completed several pieces of script in a range of digital mediums of your choice.

What you'll learn

- Specialised knowledge of histories, forms, and traditions of writing for digital performance as well as the cultural contexts of innovative practitioners and practices within digital performance; of contemporary critical, analytical, and narrative theories of digital media and performance;

- detailed understanding of key performance components within the discipline, to include: ideational sources, body, space, image, sound, text, movement, environment.

- dramaturgical and script-editing skills within digital and radio scripts

- developed advanced self-management skills to include working in planned and improvisatory ways, as well as the ability to anticipate and accommodate change, ambiguity, creative risk-taking, uncertainty and unfamiliarity;

- how to create effective structure within a scene; how to edit your script; how to create effective characters within online narratives.