Wednesday, 7 October 2015

Pre-Production Unit: Research - First Ideas Part 3: A Blank Slate

I had several problems with this ‘guy likes a girl he lives with’ idea:

- It seemed too sparse of ideas or areas this could lead to.

- It’s set in one location: the house.

- Hardly any character interaction.


These to me were issues and I wanted the opposite of these: several locations; multiple characters and a good deal of content and scenarios happening to keep interest sustained.

I comprised a list of aspects I wanted to have in my major project to help me form an idea around these:




My planning stage can be messy and unorganised: generally consisting of me typing anything that comes into my head down. I also tend to write these in the 3rd person as if I were talking to a second version of myself like a clone as I find this the easiest way to communicate my ideas to myself.

With these established I played around with combining the two ideas I currently had. I really wanted to keep things such as the subconscious character and the text-on-screen aspects as I felt these would be best features to emphasise the psychological problems the characters encounter.

My biggest problem with trying to combine all these ideas was to have a strong and cohesive story to wrap around it all. Not some half-arsed plot but what I would call a ‘Lex Film’: multiple layers; symbols; suggestions and people we actually care about. I use the term 'Lex Film' because it must contain the following:

- A strong storyline with no errors or inconsistencies.
- An strong use of silence, lack of dialogue and cinematography to provoke specific emotions and thoughts related to the particular scene or one of the themes of the film.
- A focus on the psychology of the character(s).
- My shooting style (explained in separate post).

These are my styles and signatures of writing and directing when once all together in an idea then becomes a film I would gladly make and be proud of. (A full and detailed write-up about my directing and writing style is in a separate post called ‘My Directing and Writing Style).


At this point in time, I had none of the main criteria. My motto and philosophy when it comes to creating a film be it the writing or directing is:

 “A good film makes you watch; a great film makes you care.” 

I stick with this quote whenever I develop an idea, and at this stage I didn’t feel that was the case for the reasons at the top. This meant I needed to come up with something else that did contain the aspects I wanted.

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