Fulten Larlar & Boran Aksoy

Stories with Impact: Integrating Ethical Reflection and Audience Impact into Screenwriting and Creative Practice

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This presentation explores how screenwriting education can cultivate students as conscientious creators who understand that every individual narrative decision is also a collective one.

 

Focusing on the 2nd year undergraduate Department of Communication and Design students’ screenplay projects as case studies, the study outlines a new pedagogical approach to screenwriting that reframes creative assignments as interventions: opportunities to challenge assumptions, encourage ethical considerations, and actively consider audience impact. The tools Conscience Questions (for character development) and Ripple Mapping (for visualizing audience impact) are integrated to help students think beyond the frame when they are writing their 10-minute short fiction films in three drafts.

 

The presentation shares examples of student screenplays that evolve through ethical reflection through the use of these answers and maps to achieve an act of consequence and responsibility. In an era of global crises and polarized discourse, creative education must do more than teach form and technique—it must nurture conscience, conviction, and compassion in the act of creating.

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Fulten Larlar received her M.F.A. in Motion Pictures and Television from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco with honors on a Fulbright Scholarship. She has written, directed, and produced a number of award-winning short fiction and documentary films. Larlar teaches university-level screenwriting, media and design studio, and filmmaking-related courses and also professionally reads screenplays for story analysis.