How to GET IDEAS for making your own films | TOP 5 TIPS

"I want to make my own film but I can't get any ideas!"

Does this sound like you?

Steve Ramsden here with DIY Moviemaking and today we are looking at my top 5 tips for getting ideas to make your own films!

One of the biggest challenges with setting out to make a film is getting the idea in the first place. Now one way is of course to work with a separate writer and ask if they have any existing ideas for you to adapt or direct as your own film. But most low-budget filmmakers often start off without knowing any writers or they just want to try their own ideas so they don’t need to wait around for other people to help. So I’m going to assume you want to get on with making your own film, so here are my top 5 tips on getting a good idea.

TIP 1 - RESOURCE FILMMAKING

Tip number one is to start where you are, use what you have, and do what you can. This is because RESTRICTIONS OFTEN HELP CREATIVITY. One example of this you see in everyday life is time. What happens when you have no deadline? You get no work done. What happens with a deadline? Well, you’re more likely to do the work. It’s the same with resources. If you only have a smartphone, or one lens, or one location, or one actor, then come up with something that works with just that. Need an idea for a film? Then work backwards from what you have access to, which is also known as ‘resource filmmaking’.

I’ve done this several times over the years. For my short comedy film The Noise we used the shared flat that I was living in at the time and came up with a story that could almost completely be set there. My short horror film In Memoriam was deliberately written for a nearby location and two particular actors I knew. For the comedy project My First Plane Wreck which I co-wrote and acted in with some friends, the whole idea came from a single giant ‘prop’ - a full-scale cargo plane fuselage which had been abandoned on the backlot at the film studio where we were working at the time. So although that’s a bit of an extreme example, you might find a location or object and then say, ok, what’s the story? And then reverse-engineer a film around something, somewhere or someone that you’ve found.

Back when I was a teenager, I would often film scenes while I was on holiday somewhere interesting, and then write the story around it later to fit It in – let’s say I would shoot some exteriors for a scene in Paris, and then shoot the interiors back home in a friend’s house once I had worked out the story. I’d always be saying “Let’s film it now and we’ll work out how to use it later!”

Funnily enough, one of my biggest influences was ‘Bowfinger’ the film about a broke director who makes a movie by secretly following a big Hollywood star around with a camera. Now while I don’t encourage doing that or anything else that’s illegal, so many of my filmmaking experiments have involved working backwards from something that I could film first and then write a story around. Having a trip abroad? Then there’s your location scene. Large event happening in your town? There’s your crowd scene or some extra production value! So I say, “start where you are, use what you have, and do what you can”.

TIP 2 - KEEP IT SHORT

Tip number two is to start with an idea that is short. It’s easier to begin by making short films and work your way up to something longer. Now when I started making films back when I was a teenager, I wasn’t very aware of short films and I certainly wasn’t that interested in them – I thought, I know how long films are, I watch them all the time! They’re 90 minutes or 2 hours! And so that’s what I tried making – I wrote and filmed my own home-made feature length spy films that I could make with my friends, which because we were filming on weekends sometimes took months or whole years to make, and as a result the quality was a lot lower because I had less time to get everything.

So I would just say the shorter the better for your first project, and just concentrate on making a great short film rather than an average long film. And some ideas will actually work better for a short film anyway. So don’t think trying something very short is a bad thing – if anything, if you share it online, the shorter it is, the more people will probably watch it.

So start by seeing if you can think of a very simple idea with a beginning, middle and an end that can be done in 2 minutes or less. There are hundreds of great short films easily available to find online to give you ideas on platforms like YouTube and Vimeo, and you might end up thinking you can improve upon the ideas of something that you see.

Now if 2 minutes still sounds too long to you then make a micro-film – just one short scene, something like 30 seconds – and if you think you can’t tell a story in that time, watch any TV commercial and you’ll see that you can. Now you won’t have time for much character development or backstory, but you can still have a quick beginning, middle and end. Now 30 seconds works especially well for comedy because you can set it up quickly, and you see this all the time in ads on TV, whereas dramas normally need a bit more time to set things up and make the audience care.

TIP: 3 - PICK THE RIGHT SCALE 

Tip number three is to pick an idea of the right scale for what you think you can currently do. Ask yourself if you honestly have the resources to tell your story, in terms of time, locations, people to act or be crew, and most of all money. So try and keep your idea cheap - most people don’t have a lot of cash to spend on their passion projects. Now you can of course apply for funding but this can be hard and takes a long time. But if you can pay for your film yourself, then you control the money, and so you can make the film you want to make.

To keep things cheap and simple, do yourself a favour by writing something with just a few characters and not hundreds, and maybe just one or two locations which are not too far apart to keep travel time down. If you ‘fight against’ your low budget it will show, but if you lean into it then it probably won’t.

Now horror, comedy and drama are the genres that tend to work the best for short films, while action and sci-fi are harder unless you already have access already to most of what you need.

Robert Rodriguez suggests that you should ‘refuse’ to spend money on your film, as once you start and turn that money hose on, it keeps dripping and it’s very hard to stop. So if you don’t turn it on, you will be forced to think of more creative ways to make your film.

TIP 4 - DRAMA!

My fourth tip is to use the basic principals of drama – now traditionally you need a character, they need a goal and you need some conflict that is preventing them achieving that goal. Most stories no matter how big or small will do this – they will establish a character, they will give them a problem, and they will make them act on it, and then there’s a result of some kind – either they succeed or fail.

So always ask: what does the character want? Because this will dictate their actions. Good films will have a clear goal for their character and not have the audience wondering about what anyone is doing and why they are doing it. So try and apply these basic principals to any first idea that you have.

TIP 5 - THE 3 R'S

Tip number 5 is: if you are looking to make something to simply share online, you might want to think about the things you probably enjoy when you watch things this way. The big three things usually are: is it RELEVANT, is it RELATEABLE and is it SHAREABLE? These are normally the things that mean a video becomes the next viral sensation, or at least doesn’t do too badly, so if this is what you want for your little film idea, then think along those lines.

You might be able to design a film that ties into a popular trend that is already getting talked about or searched for, and you can benefit from that if you make it and share it quickly enough. If the topic is something that a lot of people can relate to such as a common problem, not only can this give you a ton of ideas from everyday life, but again lots of people may be more likely to watch it and hopefully enjoy it and share it with others.

People will often share something that produces a strong emotion – laughter, tears, shock, and so again think of what makes you share something with others. So thinking about relevance, relatability and share-ability can be a great tactic if you want to work backwards from an online distribution point of view.

So there you go folks, that’s my 5 tips for getting an idea to make your own films, so get thinking of that killer idea that you can make right now. Stop waiting for the perfect moment, it doesn’t exist, just write your ideas down.

And if you want to learn more about low budget filmmaking in general then head to diymoviemaking.com and check out my full courses.

Happy moviemaking and I’ll see you next time!