Ideas 2: The Process

Again.. ideas. They're all over the place, all the time.

Some "what if"s:
"What if my boss's wife asked me to artificially inseminate her?"
"What if I came into possession of information that could take down the president, and nobody knew I had it?"
"What if I discovered a line of covert code in Internet Explorer that severely violated privacy law."
"What if bought a used book at a flea market and found within the pages..." ... what? It could be anything, couldn't it? A forgotton handwritten Einstein theory. A Lennon song. A recipe for cooking human flesh that gets you little curious. There's three movies right there. Well, actually, three movie ideas. Now all we have to do is craft a story around said idea.

That's what I've been doing. Last Friday I charged myself with developing an idea into a workable story that will subsequently be written into a script.

I've made progress.

It all started with a heist. The idea. I wanted to write a heist movie. So did my filmmaking partner Warren, we both love the idea of, and the successful execution of, good heist movies.

So we each jotted down thoughts and ideas, character sketches and act breakdowns... and, as usual, we both came up with completely different approaches; completely different tones. That's OK. Luckily we both have relatively small egos (his almost non-existent), and we both just want a good story. (Of course I think mine is better than his and he thinks his is better than mine:)

Anyway.

This stage of the process is painful. I get hung up on details sometimes, unable to grasp the larger story. Tone is vital here. A comedy? A black comedy? A straight drama with comic undertones? Overtones? You also don't want "plot" to override the "premise". That is to say, what is the story "about"? Not what's going on in the plot, but rather, what is the story about. Why are you, the audience, being told this story? What is the story's intent?

So, I continue to work through the story. A heist movie. Easy, right? A bunch of guys with different skills get together and pull off an intricately planned robbery. Maybe they get away with it. Maybe they get caught. Maybe there's a double cross (well, there's usualy a double-cross, ). Or maybe there's not.

The problem that I often run into is that I want to re-invent the genre. There's so many heist movies out there and I'm afraid of just doing the same old thing. But it's all been done, right? I just have to figure out a way to do it better. Or at least... different.