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Wealth of content - how do you make a movie?
- Thread starter Dean Jay
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I am working on my idea, but my idea is apparently shit for 2021, but I know a lot of others....so. And when I mean others...I mean many dreams.
I usually find a point in what I do, this is just a long haul to find it
I have a long success record of being on point, but yes, I am in abyss, and quite frankly, I do not want to be here. Call it torture.
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My question pertains to your use of the word content - how do you define that, in the context of making a movie?
I use my ideas/concepts, life experience, and imagination to come up with a story, and then write (and re-write and re-write) a script.
From the script to a budget, a director, cinematographer, casting, more crew, shooting schedule - more or less in that order.
It seems like you're taking a different approach but I don't understand what that approach is so I can't comment on how you'd go from your wealth of content to making a movie.
You sometimes see a wealth of content when people are making historical documentary.
There is hundreds upon hundreds and hundreds of hours of footage that they have to watch and select from and then form a story out of.
What the hell, I'll jump into this weird thread.
I have box sitting on my desk. I open it and it's full of gold coins and gems. I close the box an it just sits on my desk as a decoration. Wealth of content? Nope; it's just a box full of things sitting on my desk. If I take those coins and gems and spend them on booze, blow and bimbos is that wealth of content? No, it's a waste. If I take those coins and gems and invest them in the market is that wealth of content. Negative, it's accumulation. If I take those coins and gems and invest in helping the disadvantaged or saving the planet is that wealth of content? Yes; I have used those resources to improve myself by improving the world around me. So, from my perspective, wealth of content as applied to filmmaking is making quality content that at the very least diverts people from the troubles of everyday life and at best plants in the audience the seeds for something positive.
I have box sitting on my desk. I open it and it's full of gold coins and gems. I close the box an it just sits on my desk as a decoration. Wealth of content? Nope; it's just a box full of things sitting on my desk. If I take those coins and gems and spend them on booze, blow and bimbos is that wealth of content? No, it's a waste. If I take those coins and gems and invest them in the market is that wealth of content. Negative, it's accumulation. If I take those coins and gems and invest in helping the disadvantaged or saving the planet is that wealth of content? Yes; I have used those resources to improve myself by improving the world around me. So, from my perspective, wealth of content as applied to filmmaking is making quality content that at the very least diverts people from the troubles of everyday life and at best plants in the audience the seeds for something positive.
I wouldst suggest, sir, that thou perform an air-born fornication through a rotating breakfast pastry.
On the Internet? Content is KING. With a film? Story is KING. I think I know what you're getting at. If you have a ton of knowledge and content about something, how would you go about turning all that into a film? You have to turn it all into a story of some kind and a story that's going to GRAB US and not let us go. I think the way you're explaining it here thus far? Almost sounds like a boring documentary full of fluff. Here's the deal... If you're not used to creating stories out of thin air? I can understand where you're coming from but now you're talking and asking people who actually have EXPERIENCE doing this.
I personally need to know NOTHING about any subject matter I write a story around. The Internet makes this possible now. No more sitting in a city library for 5 hours a day searching for just enough information to get my story off and running. Additionally? The Internet provides us with more of an INSIDE LOOK into almost any subject matter we want to write about. That is... As long as you know how and where to search for it.
I may take whatever information I do find and run it past an expert just for clarification... Or to expand on what I have but even then? A lot of times, none of that super-specific information is necessary for the actual story.
Everyone's being honest with you... It's all about the STORY. Not about the content. Turn the content INTO a STORY.
I personally need to know NOTHING about any subject matter I write a story around. The Internet makes this possible now. No more sitting in a city library for 5 hours a day searching for just enough information to get my story off and running. Additionally? The Internet provides us with more of an INSIDE LOOK into almost any subject matter we want to write about. That is... As long as you know how and where to search for it.
I may take whatever information I do find and run it past an expert just for clarification... Or to expand on what I have but even then? A lot of times, none of that super-specific information is necessary for the actual story.
Everyone's being honest with you... It's all about the STORY. Not about the content. Turn the content INTO a STORY.
THX, jeaaa... that makes sense. I'm a documentary maker myself. But I don't know how he wants to make a fiction movie from this. Its like when the started to work on suicide squad. There was no clear plan, budget or script. The result is a incoherent mes of a movie.
You cant do that if you have a crew and volunteers...... unless your filming yourself. (could be interesting)
Where all guessing here because we don't have a clear description of what Dean Jay means or wants to do.
YES IT CAN BE FROM IMAGINATION. LOL. That's what we're TRYING to tell you. You're thinking depth as more specific information about the content itself. Depth has MORE to do with your characters. Their backstories. Utilizing subplots. Theme and dialogue adds depth to the story. As storytellers, we're TRYING to get our audiences to take an EMOTIONAL JOURNEY through the telling of our story. We're not trying to get them to learn as much as possible about some content. Unless of course, you can define CONTENT differently than you have thus far.And I can dig that, but without content, there is no story. There has to be depth to a story, it can not just be from imagination.
There are stories all around
Wow Unknown; Thanks!
As amazing as it is to me, I have been doing some writing, what with the lock-down and business being slow. I've had some ideas in my head for a long time now, and, with nothing better to do, after my usual daily start-up routine I've been pounding away at my laptop.
My initial idea was to just write down notes and some basic scenarios. I figured I would try to do by myself what one of my favorite directors, Frank Capra, did with some of his screenwriters. He would have a concept or a story like "The Greatest Gift" which became "It's A Wonderful Life." Capra had the basic outline and a few key scenes plus the ending, then he and Philip Van Doren Stern locked themselves in a Palm Beach hotel room for a few weeks and hashed out the script and dialog. According to Capra's daughter he did a lot of his scripts this way. That's sorta-kinda what happened to me.
It's a science fiction story that takes place in the far future. Obviously it's going to have some of the stereotypical conceits like faster than light travel and normal gravity and a few (hopefully original) ideas of my own. However, I definitely want to follow Asimov in basing as much as I can in actual current science. So I'm always bouncing over to the 'net to flesh out ideas. What is interesting is that I am not often going "Oh shit, that's not going to work," but rather "Wow, that's really cool," and it sends me off in another different but very interesting direction. Although enjoyable to watch, a lot of science fiction tends to completely ignore actual physics. So I've put a lot of effort into explaining why my space battles won't look like WWII aerial combat footage. I expanded an incidental character to cover the scientific basis for my choices, and the fantastical fiction ideas are unexplained by the characters as they aren't as smart as the geniuses that developed the gadgets. (I don't really know how a nuclear weapon works, but do grasp the general idea.) I even have some of the geniuses not know things. Neil DeGrasse Tyson mentions frequently on his Star Talk show things like "We didn't have the technology in the 80s that we do now, so we know that it's wrong, but that presented us with a whole batch of new questions we haven't been able to answer yet." I've been thinking of using a line I heard in an interview. A scientist was asked why he and his team had given up on something and his reply was, "We kept banging our heads against a wall until we got tired of the squishy sound." Could I get away with that?
As I did character and story/plot outlines I kept asking myself "Why did he do that?" or "Why did she say this?" or "How come that happened?" or "Why is it this way?" and other similar questions. After a while I just said "To Hades with it", started writing the story, and all of a sudden in less than two weeks I'm up to a little over 20,000 words and not even 1/3 of the way through. I'm not even really sure how the story ends yet; this was all supposed to be baseline information for the story I actually wanted to tell, but I got caught up in it. Does that happen to anyone else here?
I've had a lot of fun coming up with names for characters and things. For my positive military characters I've been using the last names of honored soldiers and tacking on first names I like or have created; for bad guys I'm using tyrants, etc. and doing the same thing; I used Stalin, scrambled the letters, so one bad guy is Nastil, for example. For ancillary and one-off military characters without first names I've been mashing together names of opposing military leaders, such as Patton and Rommel. "He handed the message to the communications clerk and ordered, 'Get this off to Admiral Pattommel immediately.'" (As another of my numerous asides here, figures like Rommel and Robert E Lee are terrific studies in conflicted loyalties, definitely helps with one of my characters.) I'm naming ships after musicians (sometimes mashing them up as well), and if the ship is destroyed I'll use the name of a musician who has passed away. I was a fan of Emerson Lake & Palmer as a kid; Keith Emerson passed in 2016, so I called one valiant but doomed ship the Emerson. Planets are named after flowers and other plants that match the characteristics of the planet. One planet is called Llanarria (I added an extra L and R), a rare but beautiful plant found in Africa. I just can't call a desert planet Cactus, so I'll take the species or genus and mash that up or distort it; Grusony came from Echinocactus Grusonii as an example.
Anyone interested in reading a chapter?
So I'll stop babbling and get back to Outpost 217. I hope they all survive, but probably not. Too bad, I really like some of these people.
I don't see why not... Especially if you rephrase it just a bit to really FIT the character who ends up saying it.
It's happened to me many times throughout the years because I do not outline. You're right... The more research you do? The more information you can use for the story pops up. My favorite research tool online is actually Quora after performing enough Google searches to educate me what to actually search for. You can discover all kinds of great insider information on Quora if you know what to search for.
Sure!
I know it's cliché but don't be afraid to kill off your darlings... LOL. It's almost always unexpected.
I'm not afraid of that at all. I've done that innumerable times with music and audio post work, although I've more often heard that saying with "babies" rather than "darlings." I guess that makes me a serial killer specializing in infanticide. There's one character that started out as incidental and kept growing in importance. I really like her and the other characters do too. So I've been "stalking" her with that in mind. I'm nowhere near that point yet, however. There is already one character that's going to buy it; I just haven't decided if it should be a heroic ending (saving comrades in battle), something tragic (disease of some kind) or something stupid (neck gets broken tripping and falling down the stairs.)
Oh good. It's nice to hear professionals do that too. I'm not a real tune-smith, but my best songs seem to come out of improvisations.
My wife and I went out with friends one time years before our daughters were born. A couple of them were/are published writers. We spent a portions of the evening figuring out amusingly applicable ways to kill people we absolutely loath, you know, like the contractor who FUBARed pouring the new back patio gets buried alive in one of his contracted projects.
Rereading this before hitting POST made me wonder if the NSA snoops get a ping on screenwriters fleshing out a film like "Olympus Has Fallen" on-line, thinking "Hey! We've got one!" Seconds later they deflate like a pricked balloon; "Oh, these guys again."
Okay, here's Chapter One of the first draft of Outpost 217. Please feel free to rip it and me to shreds; I'm a big boy... And you can post it all right here, I'm won't embarrassed. (Has anyone ever noticed that's very close to Bare Assed?)
The dialog is my biggest worry. Does it sound natural? I try speaking it aloud, but........
Just a note to you actual military types and aficionados - Yes, I know it's BARCAP, Barrier Combat Air Patrol. But there is no air in outer space, so I changed it to BARCOP, Barrier Combat Outer Patrol. In later chapters I do similar things, such as CVG, Commander Void Group because, again, there is no air. Oh, and there is a CAG, Commander Atmosphere Group, for the commander of the specialists who dive in and out of atmosphere for planetary attacks. I still have a lot to do further refining my military nomenclature to adapt to my universe.
And I like "Void" better than "Space."
As Admiral Redstone would say, "Come on son, give it to me with the bark on."
And just for fun, try to put your elbow in your ear.
If you deign to read this, you'll get it.
The dialog is my biggest worry. Does it sound natural? I try speaking it aloud, but........
Just a note to you actual military types and aficionados - Yes, I know it's BARCAP, Barrier Combat Air Patrol. But there is no air in outer space, so I changed it to BARCOP, Barrier Combat Outer Patrol. In later chapters I do similar things, such as CVG, Commander Void Group because, again, there is no air. Oh, and there is a CAG, Commander Atmosphere Group, for the commander of the specialists who dive in and out of atmosphere for planetary attacks. I still have a lot to do further refining my military nomenclature to adapt to my universe.
And I like "Void" better than "Space."
As Admiral Redstone would say, "Come on son, give it to me with the bark on."
And just for fun, try to put your elbow in your ear.
If you deign to read this, you'll get it.My story is about a late 90s long distance service call company/ call center (the story isn’t that) the story is those that call others at home ‘the workers’ that call others , the focus is the callers as the story, not the idea. Niche in time
not really, the story is the front desk workers during that time
but idea could transition into that universe for late 90s callers/telemarketers for sure
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