The journey of every artistic adventure
Begins with the seed of an idea.
Probably the most frustrating part of being a movie maker is coming up with ideas for stories. I spent the last ten years trying to find a path around this issue and, after a bundle of books, bad ideas, and time spent devoted to other people's stories, I cracked a little self-starting boilerplate that works for any micro-budget movie.
GALLOPS Goal Audience Location Limits Originate Play
Sort
Easy enough to remember, right?
Think the first motion picture by Eadweard Muybridge, The Horse in Motion, 1878.
OR REMEMBER,
The hero GALLOPS into action.
Still a little lost?
Okay, let's walk through it.
1. Set a personal GOAL. What are we trying to accomplish here? It's important to know what you are really attempting to do with this to set the scope. The goal could be to make your first movie, for instance.
2. Determine the AUDIENCE. Who do you want to entertain? Is it something you want to share with your friends, peers, your family, young women between the ages of thirteen to twenty-four? The more specific, the easier it will be to make an entertaining and quality movie.
3. Set the LOCATION. Where will the production take place? This could be your living room, a garage, the woods behind your parent's house. Somewhere that works for the story and won't add excessive pressure or restraints during principal photography.
4. Determine your LIMITS. How do we plan to make the movie? Even the deepest pockets have a linning. Understand what's realistic and what isn't. All we need is a camera to roll on, clean audio, and a means of assembling the captured footage into a cohesive story, technically. There is a wealth of wonderful projects made on a shoestring.
5. ORIGINATE Theme, Genre, & Character. What's the general idea of the story? An example would be; "the movie's about not opening doors into the unknown, a horror film, about a young boy." Simple. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.
6. PLAY. Toss the idea around to friends & family. Shake it up a bit. Get together with people who represent your AUDIENCE members, your family, friends at the coffee shop, and have some fun trying to craft an entertaining idea for a movie and then bat around the ideas. Try out different titles, come up with supporting characters. Get some people recruited to act out ideas. Improvise, role-play characters if that's what you're into. Test different demographics to hear out different points of view. This process can be as long or short as it needs to be, but you will know when you've found the most entertaining and effective idea for this movie.
7. SORT the ideas out into a Story Spectrum.
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