The Making of a Short Film - Part 2

Someone once said, “You can turn a good script into a bad movie. But, you can’t turn a bad script into a good movie.” So I needed to come up with a good idea to turn into a great script. For Christmas my wife bought me a little black notebook, big enough to carry in my back pocket. I try and carry that thing everywhere I go. I write down any idea that comes to me, even if it’s just a sentence. I always try to get ideas from things I see and do everyday and write them down and I am always trying to think of new story ideas.

While mowing the lawn one day I had an idea for a story that would eventually become The Last Defense. Once I realized I had an idea for a story I liked, I decided to make it something I could actually film myself. This made things a little more difficult. Normally when telling a story you have no limitations. Your imagination is all that stops you. But, by trying to write something I could film myself I had to take several factors into consideration. First, it should only be about 10-15 minutes long, preferably 10. Seeing how I had never done this before, I didn't think it was a good idea to start off too big. Next, were the locations. All the locations in the script had to be something I had access to. Lastly, I had to leave out things like car crashes or anything else that would be too “big” for something I would be shooting personally. So, I had to tell a compelling story in just over ten minutes with a limited number of locations with no special effects or scenes that would be impossible to shoot myself.

Looking back, and even though I consciously wrote the script with these things in mind I was still a little overzealous and naïve. But over the next several months I pondered over the story changing it here and there until finally I sat down and typed the thing out. I made a couple of drafts myself before showing it to my wife and then making another draft. I then gathered the nerve to show it to those outside my home which was actually a difficult thing to do. I had put a lot of work into this. This was my creation, my story. To paraphrase Marty McFly, I wasn’t sure if I could handle the rejection. The first person I sent it to was a self proclaimed expert on screenwriting. And while I didn’t agree with her narrow minded view on storytelling she was a tremendous help in learning some of the finer details of screenwriting. When she returned the pages to me they were covered in red. After making many changes I sent the script to friends and family, I posted it here on my blog and to several screenwriting forums. All of the responses were favorable overall with a few suggestions here and there on how to improve things like dialogue.

At this point I had made a huge step. A step I feel many people never make. So, I was proud of this small accomplishment of having actually sat down and written a story (even if it is only eleven pages long). So, now I was ready to make my movie, or so I thought.