After a series of successful scriptwriting workshops, Indiantelevision Dot Com now offers aspiring writers a much needed full fledged, well rounded and complete script writing course.

Qalam, a three month course, scheduled to begin on 2 August 2003 will be guided by a governing board that comprises Nimbus Communications CEO Dr Akash Khurana, Siddhant Cinevision creative director Vinod Ranganath, Indian Television Dot Com CEO Anil Wanvari, television creative professional Aditya Seth and writer-director Vijay Victor Acharya.

The course will boast a faculty that includes television luminaries like noted scriptwriters and directors including Sanjay Upadhyay, Ishan Trivedi, BM Vyas, Ashwani Dhir and many more. Aditya Seth will be the course co-ordinator for Qalam.

The television scriptwriting course has been born of the belief that the industry needs to absorb trained writers, just as scribes too, need to be tutored in the science and art of scriptwriting for television.

The Qalam syllabus has been broken down into three modules, crafted specially to cater to different skill sets that need to be mastered by the students. In the first module, trainers will initiate students in the rudiments of story ideas that are relevant to television, the different kinds of concepts that work for the medium and the creation of the characters that go to make up a complete story. The second module will deal with how to weave a story into an interesting teleplay, the graphing of a story for the teleplay, the difference in the teleplay for different kinds of stories and on how to create the cliff hangers that define a teleplay.

The third module will deal with the construction of the scene and dialogue. The fourth module will have students creating a story from an idea/concept, creating the characters, developing plot points and overall graph. They will be required to write an episodic teleplay and dialogues for an episode.

The course will run for 12 weeks with three interactive sessions per week. The weekend sessions will be longer, and the focus will be to illustrate the educational experience with the help of video sessions. Additionally, participants will be urged to take part in the discussions, ideation and analyses. Interactivity will be the keyword for the entire course.

Each module of the course will take up to three weeks and six to nine sessions. Admission to the course will be decided on the basis of an entrance test aspirants will have to answer, that will test their language, perception and ideation skills. The questionnaire will shortly be put up on www.indiantelevision.com along with eligibility criteria, course content and other details.

The course fees have been set at Rs 10,000. Indian Television Dot Com is also looking for partners to offer scholarships/fellowships for deserving candidates who may not be able to afford the fees.

Click here to view the detailed syllabus for Qalam