8 WAYS BEGINNING FILMMAKERS CAN AVOID THE BIGGEST MISTAKES

Introduction to the Series

ACTION!

8 Ways to Make Great Films

and Actually Have Fun While Doing It

So I’ve been teaching screenwriting and filmmaking for over a decade and it’s clear to me that making a great film is extremely hard. I have seen so many films fall part at the script stage, at the pre-production stage, at the production stage… Well, you get the point. It’s easy to fail. Why?

I think the reason is that filmmaking has so many aspects to it: storytelling, scriptwriting, producing, acting, design, shooting, sound, editing, and more. And when we take on all of those elements all at the same time, it’s like juggling 10 balls at once when you haven’t mastered two. Some things are going to fall. And it’s not going To be pretty.

And so many amateur filmmakers wonder why they dropped all of those balls. I get it. It’s embarrassing and often confusing when we fail; I’ve been there. I’ve wanted to give up after a film has gone down in flames. It’s normal. But there’s a better way.

There are two important ideas that will help. The trick is to:

A. Simplify the filmmaking process into manageable tasks and...

B. Sequence those tasks in a correct order.

I know it may seem obvious to say: “You must simplify the process by focusing one element at a time.” But I’ve studied other approaches and typically, the common approach is to try to download all of the concepts you need at one time to the student and then have them go make a short film trying to use all of this concepts at the same time. I’ve seen this approach crash and burn because it’s too much information. It doesn’t allow students to really learn with confidence. And it’s not fun.

When you simplify the process, it does two things.

1. The process is fun and feels good. I have seen students with no experience make great shorts which results in their confidence going way up and they enjoy themselves.

2. It lays the foundation for more skills. When we don’t learn the basics, and we skip ahead to more advanced material, it is a recipe for failure. We need a strong foundation to move forward.

This brings us to the next important concept… Sequence.

I have seen my students want to jump into advanced film types right away. In the early years, I let them and it was almost always a disaster. When you try to write and shoot dialogue without understanding the fundamentals of visual storytelling. It can lead to some films with both bad visuals and bad dialogue. Many of us have seen so many movies and TV that we assume we know how to make movies and TV. But just because you have seen someone drive a car, doesn’t mean you can drive one with no actual experience.

So with this in mind, here’s the order of the eight concept-driven projects we’re going to cover in this blog:

1. Suspense: How to engage your audience with compelling images and the basics of storytelling like a character's objective.

2. Connection: How to emotionally connect with your audience with intermediate story concepts like emotional stakes and relationships.

3. Conflict: How to use more advanced story techniques to deepen the audience’s engagement with building complications.

4. Performance: How to create believable performances with actors with emotional prep.

5. Dialogue: How to show compelling characters and stories through their dialogue.

6. World building: How to make your dialogue, actions and settings believable and powerful through exploring the story's world.

7. Genre Exploration - Comedy: How to make your audience laugh on purpose and use comedy to give release tension.

8. Genre Exploration - Drama: How to move an audience to insight and deep emotion and dealing with character's arc.

Each of these projects will include all of the stages of film production:

A. Development: Writing your script

B. Pre-production: Planning your film

C. Production: Shooting your film

D. Post-production: Editing your film

E. Distribution: Showing your film

The key here is to get each of these projects done as well as you can but do them quickly and finish them. When you are beginning, it’s important to make a lot of short films. Only when you get to the end of your film and you are sitting in an audience watching the film with them, will you know what the impact of your choices are. When an audience laughs at the right place or are dead silent in all of the wrong places, you’ll feel it and that’s the best feedback. You’ll just know. And all of the feedback circles and discussions about why the script works or doesn’t, won’t be as effective as making your film and watching it with an audience.

And another reason for making a lot of short films is that to be honest, there are going to be a few bad films in there. Just like when you started learning how to ride a bike, you fall a few times (or a lot), you’ll “fall” with filmmaking. So you might as well make them short "falls." Your learning curve will be so much less painful and it’s just a much healthier approach to the filmmaking. Take Woody Allen for example. The guy has made a film every year since 1965! That's prolific. There are a lot of bad ones in there but there are also some of the greatest films in American cinema in there too.

One more side note. In these eight projects, we’ll go over the technical aspect of filmmaking too. You can’t make your film without it! But things like screenplay formatting, pre-production planning techniques, how to shoot your film, how to edit, etc. are in service to only one thing: The Story. I like to subscribe to the philosophy of the most successful film studio in last two decades, Pixar. Their creative leadership says that the most important motto for all of their films is: “Story is king.” It’s worked for them in the box office and with critics. It’ll work for you.

Okay, that’s enough talking. Let’s get started!