The first thing you need to do is to catch the audience's imagination early. Write a script that will play around with the audience's imagination. Once you have their attention, it will be much easier to continue with the script. Always make your audience wonder what's going to happen next.

A good short film needs a story in which something happens that has a discernible effect on the main character. All successful short films focus on one moment/event. That moment is likely to be:

• one of universal significance

• a moment that is of significance to the protagonist

• one that produces a situation in which the stakes are high for the protagonist

Finding the Story


Any kind of dramatic story requires 3 basic elements:

• A world

• A character

• A problem

The World

Because of the need to establish an instantly recognizable world in order to get on with exploring a character’s problem, it can be useful to set your film around a familiar event or ritual. With a setting of this sort you can take for granted the audience’s familiarity with the situation and you have immediately placed your characters into a story world full of barely suppressed emotions, which is always useful for generating dramatic tension and story events.

Another popular setting for the short film is the journey. Most short films focus on a pivotal, significant event in the life of the main character so that the story inevitably takes the character on a metaphorical emotional.

The Character & The Problem

The most important questions to ask yourself when you begin to develop your story are:

• Who is the main character?

• What is their problem?

• How will the audience recognize the problem?

• Am I telling the story from the best point of view?

The audience must be clear from the outset who the film is about and they won’t be if you aren’t. Your main character is the one who has the problem and if there isn’t a character in the story with a problem then you don’t have a film, or at least not one that will work as a dramatic narrative. What is driving your main character through the story must be one of the following:

1. a want

2. a need

3. an obligation

And in all cases it must be clear to the audience, even if it isn’t to the character, what this is. But what must also be present in the story - and apparent to the audience - is something that is making it hard for the character to pursue their want, need or obligation.

Making Problems Manifest to the Audience

The way in which you turn a character’s inner problem into the heart of your film and make sure that the audience can SEE it is one of the most important ways that you can demonstrate your skill as a filmmaker and not just as a story-teller. When we’re reading books we can be inside a character’s head but when we’re watching films we need to see characters DOING things that show us what they are thinking and feeling.

Am I Telling the Story from the Best Point of View?

Think about the story of Cinderella and imagine if you told it with one of the ugly sisters as the main character. You could still make a good story but it would not have a happy ending (in one of the earliest versions of the story the sisters have their eyes pecked out by blackbirds at the end!) and therefore would have a very different meaning.

What Does My Story Mean?

You probably don’t set out to write a film with a moral or even with a conscious awareness of what your story means but every story communicates some meaning to the audience.

Tone of the Film

Tone is intimately connected to genre and though genre is less of an issue in shorts than in features it is still important to think about what kind of film you are writing.

Remember

• A good script should get the audience involved as the story unfolds. For example, great heroes in the movies should inspire your audience.

• At times, you may get stuck. This can be frustrating but getting stuck will mean that you made a mistake somewhere in the script. Review your script, edit it, and move on.

• If you have a sense of imagination, you can write a good script but writing a script also means a hard work.

• The key to writing a good script is by capturing the audience's imagination whether you are writing a script for drama, action, comedy, or a thriller.


Finally.... Nietzsche said

The need of strangeness before a true piece of art, that one which is not identifiable at a first sight. That piece which asks for some effort to reveal itself little by little