A World Born from a Mind

            In our world, there are set rules that we must follow. Don’t drive over the speed limit; don’t make a scene in public; be polite to others. Our lives are intricate, each person having their own story, their own motives and unique ideas. The same ideas apply to film. When creating an entirely new world, you have to create rules that the characters must follow, create consequences for their actions, and make sure that each of the character’s lives are unique and interesting. Filmmakers are able to do this in a visual medium, making their works some of the most emotional and impacting things people see. Throughout the course of the next two months, I’ll be reading Movie Making Course: 2^nd Edition by Ted Jones and Chris Patmore, and making a short film of my own.

            There are three main stages in filmmaking: pre-production, production, and post-production. However, before anyone can start in pre-production, they must first think of a story. A great way to think of a story is to just write. As stated in the book, giving myself regular periods every day to write can foster ideas, whether good or bad. Then, once I have a good basis of a topic, I can then branch off and delve into deeper and more complicated ideas (Jones and Patmore 10). The question I constantly asked myself was “What message do I want to convey?” All of my teachers have told me that a good story isn’t told unless it means to teach you something. I hoped to achieve that same goal.

            After doing some brainstorming, I decided to create a story around abusive relationships and the idea that looks can be deceiving. To help encourage the details of the story, I wrote down sentences briefly describing scenes that stuck out in my mind. These scenes existed in the 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd act of the story.

After thinking about the premise of the story some more, I then created a step outline, as suggest by the book. “By writing a step outline you can see how your script is developing, where rewrites or revisions may be needed to control your script, and check how successful you are communicating your story” (Jones and Patmore 11). By creating this outline, I was able to examine how I could create a cohesive story and how that story would help convey the theme I wanted.

            I then moved onto fleshing out my characters and making sure they were interesting and round, a character type discussed in English class. I wanted to ensure that the two characters, named Noah and Violet, seemed real, with scenes in the film that would show you this. One tip that the book suggests is to think about traits that the characters have, and then to create moments that would showcase these traits to the audience (Jones and Patmore 13).

Another thing I did to help create more realistic characters is to do the previous tip stated, but with the character types we’ve learned in English class. I did this because in my personal experience, a character that is flat and static throughout an entire story is like watching statues exchange pleasantries.

  

            Character development is crucial to a story. Making sure that I know my characters inside and out allowed me to ensure that the story itself would be interesting and captivating, perhaps making me a little bit of a better storyteller. Hopefully I’ll be able to capture the same depth of the characters in-camera. As I finish up this post, I would like to pose a question for those of you reading: do you think that it’s important for a story to tell a message, or do you think that perhaps a story can be good for just entertainment, even without a message?

Works Cited

Jones, Ted, and Chris Patmore. "Where's the Story?" Movie Making Course, 2nd ed., Barron's Educational Series, 2012, pp. 10-13.