In a world awash in screenwriting books, The Science of Screenwriting provides an alternative approach that will help the aspiring screenwriter navigate this mass of often contradictory advice: exploring the science behind storytelling strategies. Paul Gulino, author of the best-selling Screenwriting: The Sequence Approach, and Connie Shears, a noted cognitive psychologist, build, chapter-by-chapter, an understanding of the human perceptual/cognitive processes, from the functions of our eyes and ears bringing real world information into our brains, to the intricate networks within our brains connecting our decisions and emotions. They draw on a variety of examples from film and television -- The Social Network, Silver Linings Playbook and Breaking Bad -- to show how the human perceptual process is reflected in the storytelling strategies of these filmmakers. They conclude with a detailed analysis of one of the most successful and influential films of all time, Star Wars, to discover just how it had the effect that it had.

In a world awash in screenwriting books, The Science of Screenwriting provides an alternative approach that will help the aspiring screenwriter navigate this mass of often contradictory advice: exploring the science behind storytelling strategies. Paul Gulino, author of the best-selling Screenwriting: The Sequence Approach, and Connie Shears, a noted cognitive psychologist, build, chapter-by-chapter, an understanding of the human perceptual/cognitive processes, from the functions of our eyes and ears bringing real world information into our brains, to the intricate networks within our brains connecting our decisions and emotions. They draw on a variety of examples from film and television -- The Social Network, Silver Linings Playbook and Breaking Bad -- to show how the human perceptual process is reflected in the storytelling strategies of these filmmakers. They conclude with a detailed analysis of one of the most successful and influential films of all time, Star Wars, to discover just how it had the effect that it had.

In "The Grace Of Saving," her latest book, we follow the amazing story of Teri Gault from a little girl in Oklahoma all the way to the bright lights of Hollywood and eventually becoming "America's Smartest Shopper." During a time of great family need, she developed a system for drastically reducing grocery bills by rethinking the very notion of the term "saving," that simple and timeless virtue. Her system which provides for huge grocery savings is at the heart of her website, TheGroceryGame.com and has helped hundreds of thousands of people. The book also includes many great savings tips.

The great challenge in writing a feature-length screenplay is sustaining audience involvement from the opening sequence to the closing credits. Screenwriting: The Sequence Approach expounds on an often-overlooked tools can be key in solving this problem. A screenplay can be understood as being built of sequences of about fifteen pages each, and by focusing on solving the dramatic aspects of each of these sequences in detail, a writer can more easily conquer the challenges posed by the script as a whole. The sequence approach has its foundation in early Hollywood cinema (until the 1950s, most screenplays were formatted with sequences explicitly identified), and has been rediscovered and used effectively at such film schools as the University of Southern California, Columbia University and Chapman University. This book explains the concept and then provides a sequence analysis of eleven significant feature films made between 1940 and 2000: The Shop Around the Corner, Double Indemnity, Nights of Cabiria, North by Northwest, Lawrence of Arabia, The Graduate, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Toy Story, Air Force One, Being John Malkovich and The Fellowship of the Ring.