Once you have an idea you need to be sure that you fully understand everything about what you are trying to say. These methods will enable you to have a deeper understanding of your ideas. The planning stage is perhaps the most critical step to producing a successful video. Time consuming errors can be avoided by spending the necessary time to make a clear plan, right from the start of the project. This planning process is known as pre-production.
Any good project will have a strong message or theme. Deciding on your key message will hugely increase your effectiveness in communicating your issue. If you are able to concentrate your ideas down to one or two sentences, it will really help you to focus. If you don’t have an idea yet, don’t worry, this chapter is here to help you focus on what you might want to explore, and maybe help give you some ideas on how to get started and how to begin to develop these ideas into a plan for a production.
Get the idea, the one spark that gets your script going, or the main issue you want to focus on and you’ve got a great starting point.
Gather your group in one room. Try spending an hour or two with a large sheet of paper, blackboard or flipchart and a central person to to co-ordinate the proceedings, introduce the purpose of the brainstorming session and write down ideas. This will be easier if you can decide on a main theme or issue for your topic. Then, encourage everyone in the group to shout out ideas remembering these following points:
Sitting in an empty room isn’t going to inspire you - read a newspaper, get out to the cinema or exchange stories with other people. Write down anything that might be useful. Think back to something that made an impact on you, why was that and how did it work?
The great thing about coming up with concepts for a production is that you can talk through ideas in a group.
List a couple of films, documentaries, TV programmes or even adverts and start mixing them together. Take a look at the results and see if you can make a new idea.
Once you have brainstormed your idea and have a number of suggestions around it, try and then condense this down to a few key points - the ones you believe are at the heart of your idea; the essential core which you will focus on. Then try and write a one or two sentence brief, a ‘mission statement’ that includes your subject matter, how you want to tackle it and the results you would like to achieve. For example, "We wish to make a video about elderly people in the local community from a fresh perspective, including their own opinions, in the hope that people will think about and help improve the facilities available to them and the way they are treated in general." Referring back to a statement such as this will remind you of your key objectives and help to maintain focus on your story/arguments and your desired outcomes.
You could then even condense this further: for example, in Hollywood filmmaking, many films that stand out can be summed up in this way in one line - this is usually called ‘the pitch’. A couple of examples:
Jaws - ‘Man afraid of water pursues killer shark’
Batman - ‘Man avenges death of his parents by becoming a vigilante crime fighter in a costume.’
See if you can write your own for ‘Titanic’.
This may seem apparent but examining why your message is important, in relation to what you want to say, puts things into perspective. Write it down!
Once you have your idea, you can start planning the production, but it will help you develop the idea further if you think about why you want to tell this story and what effects you want to achieve. Think about your aim in making this video - is it to inspire, to inform, to entertain? What story can you tell that might make your audience think? We will look at audience in the next section, but thinking about this at this stage might help you to focus.
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