The link to the Escalator (Te Whakapiki) initiative of the New Zealand Film Comission may be short-lived but contains important information and questions for the development of films on a low budget.
The initiative is aimed at feature films but I see a lot of important questions and advice that equally relate to short films
Key Questions
- Is the material expressed with a unique voice and style?
- Does it turn limitations (i.e. a low budget) into assets?
- Your low budget film can’t have ALL of the following:
- lots of locations
- lots of characters
- lots of dialogue
- lots of scenes
- lots of shots
- lots of night shooting
- special effects
- a large crew
- an extended shooting schedule
- Why am I making this film?
- Who is my audience?
- How will I reach them?
- Why will they care?
- Who has done this before, successfully, and how/why did they succeed?
Writing a Good One-Pager
Another helpful section are tips for writing a good one-pager (which I list below in the hope that the Film Comission doesn't mind me duplicating their material).
"Condensing a feature length story into a one page synopsis is tough work even for the most experienced of writers. We are open to all approaches, but these pointers might help:
- Think about a good movie you’ve seen recently and try to write the spine of the story in three or four paragraphs
- One definition of a dramatic story is that ‘someone wants something badly but is having a hard time getting it’
- Some dramatic stories aren’t about what someone consciously wants so much as about what they need, though they probably don’t know it to begin with. If yours is one of these then think about how the audience will know what the character needs
- Write a logline that encapsulates the story. A good logline for a film with a strong dramatic premise will usually answer the questions: Who is the central character? What is their problem? What, or who is making the problem difficult to solve? And how do they ultimately deal with it?
- Write the 1-pager in three or four paragraphs that take us on a character journey through:
- The beginning, status quo, the ‘undisturbed life’
- The problem, inciting event, the thing that disrupts the ‘undisturbed life’
- Decision – what does (do) the main character(s) do now?
- Struggle – a series of escalating complications that often ends in that ‘all is lost’ or ‘long night of the soul’ moment
- Climax – where the question raised by the problem is finally answered, not necessarily in a positive way
- Resolution – the fallout from the climax, which should suggest how the audience will feel when they leave the cinema
- Try not to end the synopsis with a teasing question mark, or dot, dot, dot… We need the whole story here. We want to know how it ends!
We appreciate that you may be writing a synopsis for a film idea that you have not yet developed into a script. We know that everything may ultimately change but we still want you to present your idea as a story with a beginning, middle and end so that we can judge whether it is built around a genuinely dramatic premise that is likely to keep an audience enaged for 90 minutes."
These certainly are very useful and pragmatic tips based on solid experience.
Turning Limitations Into Assets
I especially like the notion to turn budget limitations into assets, or as the website introduces the initiative:
"The enemy of art is the absence of limitations." (Orson Wells)
References
New Zealand Film Comission. (n.d.). Low Budget Features Overview. Retrieved March 25, 2010, from http://www.nzfilm.co.nz/DevelopmentAndFinancing/Low_Budget_Features/Low_Budget_Features_Overview.aspx
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