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Writing a Short Film
Writing The 48 Hour Script
Kathryn Burnett is an experienced screenwriter and screenwriting tutor from New Zealand. She’s worked on many TV series, including Street Legal, Lost Children and Holly’s Heroes. Kathryn has also been a judge on the New Zealand 48Hours competition.
(…continued from “Writing a Short Film”) So then, how does a screenwriter attempt to do all of the above in a matter of hours? It’s difficult enough to craft a great short film over a couple of months let alone overnight. Given the time pressure it’s no surprise that many teams comprise more than one writer. Consider writing your 48-hour script with a like-minded writing partner – under pressure two minds can be better than one.
But first up – don’t panic! Sure the director, crew, and actors are all sitting around twiddling their thumbs waiting for you to turn in your script but they haven’t got much choice so focus on your task at hand.
Tip: Clear your head and concentrate on coming up with an idea – not the looming deadline.
As soon as you have your genre this is the time to immediately start brainstorming your idea (although some teams come prepared with a rough story in mind, I personally think it’s more in the spirit of 48 Hour to start from scratch – it’s challenging but fun). But before you even start brainstorming it might be a plan, if you haven’t already, to decide what type of film you’re making – is it serious drama? Black comedy? Spoof? Film Noir? Will it be arty and atmospheric? Your genre will dictate this to a degree but it’s really worth clarifying early on. The Horror genre for example can be expressed in many different stylistic ways – your intended film could be funny, satirical, disgusting, moody, experimental, arty, naturalistic or gothic.
So you now know what sort of film you all want to make – it’s time to brainstorm for the great idea. And fast. An important part of writing for the 48 Hour competition is realizing that writing at this pace is all about making the best decisions fast. Completion not perfection!
Fast, effective brainstorming requires participants to be open to throwing in any idea they might have no matter how ill formed or ridiculous. You simply don’t have time to be overly critical or perfectionist about it. What you’re doing is just throwing ideas out onto the table until something sticks or excites someone. If there’s more than one of you, you’ll invariably spark ideas in each other just by talking. But if you’re stuck – here are some brainstorming exercises to help get you going.
a) Take an emotive word e.g. Death, Greed, Lust, Jealousy or any everyday item e.g. Egg, Dog, Cupboard and spend 10 minutes coming up with a list of one sentence ideas about the word. The point of this exercise is to generate as many ideas as you can in a short period of time. The ideas can be as random and lateral as you like – many will be discarded you only need one to spark your imagination.
b) Ask yourself “what if…” over and over again. As in what would happen if the world froze over? “What if” zombies could be trained as guide dogs? “What if ” my bed was haunted? “What if” a woman woke up as a man? You can go on forever but this is a good exercise to warm up the creative part of your brain.
c) Take a classic fairytale or myth and modernize it. Or set it in another, possibly contradictory genre. For example – what if Hansel and Gretel were child stars?
d) Create an extreme character by filling in this blank “the worst (blank) in the world.” And let the characters spark story ideas. The worst babysitter, worst ninja, worst librarian, worst grandparent would surely all have a story to tell.
Tip: Give yourself a brainstorming time limit – agree with your director and any co-writers on the time that you will decide on an idea by. Obviously the sooner you commit to your idea the better.
So now you have your idea and you need to get the story down. Write down the core idea and brainstorm by asking yourself the following question:
What could happen to, for example, a man who thinks he’s a dog? The possible answers to this question are infinite and it’s now your job to choose a couple of them to build your story around.
Once you have one plot point you love – ask yourself – what happens next? Once you find that answer ask yourself the same question again.
Tip: Try to give your story a basic beginning, middle and end framework. It will stop you meandering and stalling in the middle.
As your story develops you’ll start to see who is in your story. You won’t have a lot of time to develop a huge cast of characters so focus on the main character and those integral to the story. By doing this first you’re now in a good position to quickly tell the director and crew what type of actors, locations and props you’ll probably need.
Once you have the rough story in place it’s time to write the script. My best advice at this point is to just bang out a rough draft. You don’t have time at this stage to start being fiddly or precious about dialogue and gags. Remember the objective is to get the script finished. And it doesn’t matter how rough it is, as you’ll have time to go back and improve it. It’s just so much easier to work on an existing document than a blank page.
When your rough draft is in place now you get to go back and start editing, changing and improving your script.
As you do this ask yourself the following questions – what is my core idea? Is my script serving the core idea? Is there anything that I can cut because it’s superfluous? What is my genre? And am I being true to my intended genre? Is there anything taking me out of my intended genre and can I cut it?
Tip: Try to avoid cliché (unless of course your script is a spoof or satire or intentionally corny) it will make your work more original.
And from here on in it’s just a case of refining and polishing in whatever time you have left.
Have fun and good luck!
Kathryn Burnett © 2008
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