Advice on Writing a Story

    Today, I watched a video that did end up helping me understand what the planning process of brainstorming a story consisted of. Though it seems kind of corny or unintelligent to derive information from such a quick video, I really only wanted to hear what he said about how to target the starting point of creating a short film. 

    This video gave me a great tip on the importance of creating value and meaning through a specific audience one would like to target. The creator had this to say about it:

    "This may sound a little counter-intuitive, but rather than originality when you're writing your short film, I want you to focus on entertaining yourself or a really close friend of yours. Make your audience specific so that you can make your film more specific."

    While I still cannot say I have fully formed ideas as a result of this video, this quote really resonated with me for the rest of the day enough that I felt the need to comment on it. Where I initially tried to take a concept and reverse engineer a film from whatever concept could come to my head, I have now adopted the strategy of taking stories and conversations I can remember having with my friends in the past to formulate some sort of story behind it. I don't plan to adapt a story a friend has shared with me or anything like that, I had many interesting 3AM conversations with friends that I know I can base entire stories around.

    Additionally, the video stressed the importance of writing the entire story before jumping into pre-production. Before thinking about cinematography and stylistics, I need to detail a definite beginning, middle, and end to my story. For an effective product as a whole, it's important to have the entire story defined before I begin thinking about how it will be filmed(for foreshadowing in the beginning and making the story that comes full circle.)

    I didn't finish the entire video because the only real part I was looking for in my research was advice on brainstorming, but I do plan to turn to this video for advice once I get to the pre-production and production stages of my short film.