I had two piles of blog posts just sitting there. Fifteen on the fundamentals of visual storytelling, one topic a week. Seven more distilling a longer guide I’d written about building short, emotional films. Good material. Read once, then buried in the archive like everything else on a blog.
So instead of leaving them there, I turned them into courses.
Filmmaking 101
Fifteen lessons: character entrances, point of view, stakes, reaction shots, establishing shots, the 180-degree rule, transitions, intention and obstacles, setups and payoffs, active characters, time cuts, dialogue, exposition, theme, and finally, audience. Free, self-paced, no signup. Progress saves in your browser so you can pick it back up where you left off. Read it straight through, or jump to the one thing that’s bugging you about a scene right now.
Scribbler’s Playbook
Seven lessons built around one idea: everything in a short film or video should be pointing at the same emotional question. Opening moves, scene work, four structure recipes sorted by running time, camera and edit choices, and a final alignment check for when something feels broken and you can’t say why.
This one also ships with nine fill-in worksheets. Not printouts of questions to copy onto a legal pad, actual forms. Type into one, it saves as you go, print it when you want a copy on the desk. Seven come straight from the Playbook’s own checklists. Two are worksheets I’ve used on my own projects for years (character development, location development) that never had anywhere to live online until now.
Both are free at orbitalranch.studio/course.
You’ve Probably Got One of These in a Folder Somewhere
If you’ve been doing this a while, you’ve got a version of what I had. A folder of posts. A PDF you keep attaching to emails. Notes you paste into every consult because you’re tired of retyping them. That’s not content you haven’t published yet. That’s a course you haven’t assembled yet.
A few things that made the difference between a pile of posts and something people can actually learn from:
The order you wrote it in isn’t the order someone should learn it in. My posts went up whenever a topic occurred to me. The course goes foundation, then grammar, then structure, then craft, then strategy, because that’s the order that actually builds understanding.
Reading isn’t doing. The Playbook lessons work fine on their own, but the worksheets are what make someone apply it to their own project instead of nodding along and closing the tab. If your knowledge has a checklist or a diagnostic hiding in it somewhere, pull it out and let people fill it in.
Track progress or it’s just a long scroll. Fifteen lessons with no sense of where you are is homework. Fifteen lessons with a bar that fills up is a course you finish.
I’m not a developer, and I didn’t need to become one. Same move I used to build the scene analyzer a while back: describe what you want to Claude, steer by feel, let it handle the code while you handle the part you actually know.
If you’ve got a domain you’ve earned the hard way, screenwriting or anything else, the posts explaining it are probably already written. Go see what they add up to.