Storytelling 101 Workshop

At the heart of every great film is a well-told story. This session focuses on the core elements that bring a narrative to life on screen—structure, character, visual choices, pacing, and emotional stakes. Aimed at emerging and working filmmakers alike, Storytelling 101 breaks down how to make your story clear, compelling, and resonant, no matter the genre or scale. Through real-world examples and conversation, we’ll dig into the creative decisions that shape a story from the inside out, helping you sharpen your voice and strengthen your work from script to screen.

Moderator: SHANNON LAINE SMOCK 

Shannon Laine is a SAG-AFTRA actor, strategic leader, and passionate advocate for Midwest storytellers. With a career spanning commercials, educational media, and independent film, she brings a comprehensive understanding of both the craft and the business of storytelling.

Shannon currently serves as Vice Chair of the Board for Cinema St. Louis, where she champions the power of film to inspire, inform, and connect.

She is also on the local board of SAG-AFTRA and a candidate for President of the SAG-AFTRA Missouri Valley Local, where she is focused on reconnecting members, strategic leadership, and amplifying regional opportunities for working actors and performers. 

To learn more about Shannon please visit 

Linktr.ee/shannonlaine

Panelists: 

ANDY COMPTON

Andy Compton is an Asian American writer/director from St. Louis whose work blends comedy and drama to explore class, addiction, and redemption. A former high school dropout, he got sober in his late 20s and graduated Cum Laude from Webster University. His feature BELLYACHE is optioned with an Emmy-winning team, and his short CAPTCHA won multiple awards in 2023. Andy’s stories are deeply personal, often darkly funny, and always human.

EILEEN G’SELL

Born in St. Louis, Eileen G’Sell is a poet and culture critic who mingles the literary with the critical, the creative with the academic, focusing on gender, sexuality, and economic class. She earned her BA at Knox College, her MA at the University of Rochester, and her MFA at Washington University in St. Louis. Her first full-length volume of poetry, Life After Rugby, was published in 2018 by Gold Wake Press; her second book of poetry, Francofilaments, will be published October 2024 from Broken Sleep Books. Her first book of nonfiction, Lipstick, will be published by Bloomsbury Academic’s Object Lessons series in late 2025.

G’Sell’s poetry has appeared in Poetry magazine, Fence, DIAGRAM, Oversound, The Rumpus, and The Boston Review; recent essays have appeared in The Baffler, The Hopkins Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Current Affairs, Jacobin, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. She serves as movie critic of The Hopkins Review, and makes frequent contributions to Hyperallergic, Reverse Shot, and The Riverfront Times. In 2023, she received the Rabkin Foundation award for visual arts journalism.

She teaches writing and media studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

SHUBHANGI SHEKHAR

Shubhangi Shekhar is a multi-hyphenate filmmaker from St. Louis, Missouri, and an undergraduate from New York University. She has development, digital production, directing, marketing, and journalism experience from award-winning and critically acclaimed global media companies such as A24, Verizon Media, Roy Kapur Films, Condé Nast Entertainment, and Patreon. She was also part of the inaugural class of The Salon Mentorship Program for up-and-coming South Asian talent in the directing track, under the mentorship of TV director Anu Valia. She received the Pano Microgrant as a producer, and the Brown Girl Magazine x The Cosmos Care Fund microgrant as a writer and director for her projects in 2022. She was a WIF Creative Documentary Producing Fellow from 2023-2024, and recently completed the Netflix DART (Documentary Archival Researcher Training) program in 2024. Her artistic voice is fundamentally rooted in the cross-section between Western and South Asian cinema, and she aims to tell unique stories that gauge mass audiences across language, cultural, and gender barriers. Alongside her film projects, she also supports and mentors up-and-coming South Asian writers through the Rickshaw Film Foundation. And when no one’s watching, she expresses herself through her poetry.