Books in the Routledge Studies in Media Theory and Practice series

In The Screenwriters Taxonomy, award-winning screenwriter and educator Eric R. Williams offers a new collaborative approach for creative storytellers to recognize, discuss and reinvent storytelling paradigms. Williams presents seven different aspects of storytelling that can be applied to any fictional narrative film¿from super genre, macro genre and micro genre to voice and point of view¿allowing writers to analyze existing films and innovate on these structures in their own stories. Moving beyond film theory, Williams describes how this roadmap for creative decision making can relate to classics like Sunset Boulevard, The Wizard of Oz, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as well as such diverse modern favorites like 12 Years a Slave, Anomalisa, and Shrek.

Using a series of highly detailed close readings of title designs through the interpretive lens of theories of cinematic realism, this book engages with issues of indexicality, narrative, and the difference between subjective and objective presentations, using examples of title sequences from historical film and contemporary digital cinema.