A Collaborative Guide to Creating your First Movie, from Start to Finish

This is a work in progress and it is far from finished. Please contribute to it and help make it better.

The Idea

Although you will learn a ton from making a terrible unwatchable movie, if you’re going to invest that much of your time and resources into it, it’ll be amazingly more rewarding if it’s something you’re proud of when it’s a film that some really enjoy.

Above everything else, all the technical details, all the sound, all the picture, even the actors, the fancy editing, and the script itself (this may seem ironic, but it isn’t) is the idea.

You’ve probably all liked movies before that had a less than perfect dialogue, cheesy acting and dated special effects.  What you probably liked above all was the idea and the experience of it.

Where does the idea come from?  You probably think of millions of movie ideas, it seems everyone has an idea for a film at one time or another.  Most of these ideas may revolve around changing or modifying an existing story, like this would have been so much better if it ended like this, or this character like this.  You’ve probably heard your friends, family and yourself say I think that movie should have ended this way.  Well you’re on your way to an idea. 

Most ideas are not worth pursuing and there are an almost unlimited number of unused ideas spiraling around on the internet and for good reason.  Although people may enjoy a film because of a good idea, It takes an amazing amount of work to bring an idea to fruition, so if it’s not a strong enough idea to “haunt your dreams, keep you up at night, motivate you to talk incisively for 10 minutes it may be not be good enough to base an entire movie around.

In the “Screenwriters Bible” it often talks about a good idea for script as one where you can visualize the movie, but I don’t like this guideline personally.  I have no problem visualizing the two male figure skating comedy and a hard time visualizing far future science fiction story, but I’d definitely pick the later.  It is an interesting thing to consider, when you think bout how easy it will be to get other people to care and understand the idea.  The more obtuse, the more sophisticated, the higher probability you’ll lose your audience, especially when you’re making a very amateur production.

Places to Get Inspiration From

• New takes on classic stories (vampires, Frankenstein, zombies, epic hero, mythology, etc)
• Your Real Life
• Fiction in the public domain
• Non-fiction
• Philosophy
• Creative limitations (2 actors in a room with a gun – what just happened)