In this installment of Film Making Tips, I want to talk about what is probably the most important thing when you’re first starting out…getting ideas.

If you’ve already got an idea for a movie, great. But maybe you don’t. Maybe you’re scratching your head trying to come up with something. Here are a few tips for coming up with ideas.

1. Look At What’s Already Been Done

How many times do you see remakes of old movies or, at the very least, movies that have very similar themes to movies that have already been made?

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. There have literally been millions of movies made. You should be able to easily get ideas from just going through your own list of favorite movies.

2. Look To Life

I know that real life is really not very interesting, but take something like Law & Order. Many of the stories they told were actually, as they called it, “ripped from the headlines.”

There is an old saying that truth is stranger than fiction. There are plenty of news headlines each and every day that can inspire a story. We have crime, infidelity, human interest stories, health scares and on and on. During the bird flu outbreak, there was plenty of opportunity for somebody to come up with a movie on some kind of epidemic. And throughout cinema history, there have been plenty of them.

3. Look To History

There have been so many things that have happened in history that are just ripe for story telling. You can go as far back as the bible or as recent as the war in Iraq. How many historical movies have already been made? I can’t count them all. History is always a good place to start.

4. Look To Categories

If all else fails, make a list of various categories.

Love Stories
War Stories
Crime Stories
Sci Fi Stories
Comedies
Biographies

And so on. You may have an interest in one particular kind of movie. If so, come up with your own idea for THAT kind of movie.

Do what you know and love.

In this installment of Film Making Tips, I want to discuss film length. This is an area that trips up a lot of people.One of the biggest rookie mistakes that beginning filmmakers make is that they try to stuff everything into their movie and end up with a six hour monster. Problem is, most beginning filmmakers don’t have the experience or the skills to pull something like this off and they end up with a muddled disaster.So, what you want to do, when first starting out, is make the film shorter than you actually want to make it. Leave the audience wanting more…even a sequel. In fact, you might want to leave the ending of the movie open ended so that it lends itself to a sequel. You can never give the audience too little, but you can give them too much.What you should do is map out your whole movie ahead of time with storyboards.For example, let’s take this murder mystery.1. Murder is committed.2. Police arrive on scene.3. Investigation begins.4. Suspects are questioned.5. Clues begin to surface.6. Hint of who murderer is surfaces.7. Final clue reveals murderer.8. Murderer is hunted and caught.It’s basic, but you get the idea. Then, after you have your storyboard designed, you fill in the pieces as sparsely as possible. Don’t drag things out.If you find your storyboard is pages long, then your movie is probably way too long to begin with. Storyboards should be relatively short and simple.Think Hitchcock.