One of the first things I do when I’m working on a new movie idea is to nail down my story concept. For this movie I had a scene idea developing in my head from a number of years ago, inspired by the movie The Conversation along with the track Betrayal from the original Mission Impossible movie.
Not much of a movie idea, right? Just one scene for an entire movie? Well that is where reworking the idea comes into play.
From my intial idea this was the jist of what my story was.
The first thing that I do after I have a rough idea of my story is to start listing some key elements that I see taking place in the movie.
After I have an idea of a few key elements that will take place in the story I begin to brainstorm or workshop the concept. To do this I just continue to rewrite the logline over and over varying elements as they come to me until I feel it is as clear, short and concise as possible.
I don’t stop there though. I use a method that I learned from taking classes from ScreenwritingU on creating high concept story ideas. You can take the class online anywhere in the world check it out here.
I modified it slightly to work best for my workflow, but to learn how ScreenwritingU teaches it and all the details for that you’ll have to take their class.
So I start by breaking up my story in to logical parts, such as characters, locations, events, etc. For each part I start by brainstorming as many ideas and variations of the part as I can think of. By selecting what I find the most interesting options will usually give me the concept I am going to settle on for my movie.
Now that I have some more interesting elements for my story it is back to hashing out the best version of it so I am back to how I started and write the logline out continuously until I feel it is as clear, short and concise as possible.
One element to add is how I usually go about structuring my logline. I give a breakdown of it in my eBook Five Phases of Making Movies, but here are two examples I usually reference as a foundation or starting point for my concepts.
1) Who the story is about (protagonist) 2) What he strives for (goal) 3) What stands in his way (antagonistic force or opposition)
“Movie X is the story of what happens to someone when something they prayed would never happen, happens.” -Studio Exec
Additional Resources:
Do you have a method that works for you? Share in the comments below.