Good Ideas Are Hard to Come By

As one can imagine from studying Creative Film and Moving Image, you really need to get creative and start coming up with viable short film ideas at some point of the course. With us at CCAD, it's approx. two new ideas per week for all modules. And not all of them are good.

My last idea for the filmmaking module proved to be a too wordy and literary approach with too much tell rather than show. Which was fine by me, because I deliberately tested the boundaries to see how far I can go.

And as I already stated in an earlier blog: Not very far. The problem with cinematic storytelling is, that while you conceive your idea in your head where it acts out beautifully, at one point you need to put your idea into writing so that it can be turned into a film one lucky day. And while our brain is trained to process written language easily, the audience is not so easily betrayed once dialogue is actually spoken.

A beginner's tip: If a delivered film dialogue sounds like someone reading a novel to you, you have a major problem (unless, of course, you try to achieve this effect of artificiality for a certain purpose, like period films, for example). If the dialogue does not trick us into believing that this is the real and spoken word, the filmic illusion cannot get a foothold. Suspension of disbelieve only goes so far after all.

Now, what I did today to solve my problem was going over my script and see whether I could improve upon that without dissecting my idea too much.

Sadly, it turned out that my script relied heavily on this wordy confession-scene, so much so that making amendments of it either resulted in the story falling apart completely or in the idea becoming far longer than the required ten minutes. And that is already not regarding the fact that I would have had to fall back on dreadful clichées to make it somewhat work. Which is an oxymoron in itself.

So I went back to my scriptorium, this time with the goal of coming up with an entirely new idea and script, adhering to the ten minutes, keeping it manageable as a student production and trying to rather show than tell. Which is why I set myself boundaries (or rather guidelines) on what I put into dialogue and what I put into description:

1. Whenever I came up with a new line, I would first check whether I could instead circumscribe it in an action or put it in description, rather than letting my character speak it out.

2. If I decided that, yes, a line of dialogue is actually important to keep, I would make sure that I put this line as short and concise as possible.

3. I would then check, whether or how this line serves its purpose. Does it advance the story? Does it - subtly - tell anything about the character and his motivation or feelings? Or does it simply blare out all the relevant information?

4. I would then check, whether or not I managed to put the lines naturally, will say with ellipses, pauses, interruptions and abbreviations, so that it resembled the spoken language as closely as possible without becoming too colloquial (for I hate nothing more than having to listen to a main character of a feature film talking in the harshest slang for 90 or more minutes straight. This is something that you can keep for minor sidekicks or extras to emphasise a certain genre, location or status.)

In the following, you can see the result of my script A GOOD ONE as screenshots (together with the basic story structure). Whether or not my idea and my attempts to cut down on the artificial, telling dialogue were any good, I will see on Monday when we go through it again. But I already feel that I've made a tremendous amount of progress, so either way it's going to be a win-win for me.