Have you always fancied yourself as the next Spielberg or Nolan? Filmmaking is a great way to express your artistic values and is a great thing to do as a hobby or can even be a possible career option.  I have picked up some tips from the time that I have been working with short films.  I have been talking recently with my good friend and film buff Abhishek Gattani about these tips and I have decided to put them to paper to help any other budding filmmakers.

Ideas

To be honest ideas are probably what you will struggle least with.  From what I gather if you are wanting to be a filmmaker you will have some form of creative flair waiting to be applied.  The one tip that I can mention on this is taking note for every idea you have.  What I tend to do is keep a file in the notes on my phone so whenever an idea springs to mind, I take a quick note so I can revisit it when I have time to.  Doing this stops ideas from getting hazy, a lot of the time when the idea first comes to you, you are certain you won’t forget it.  The ideas will pile up too, so when it comes to script writing if you are working with one but it doesn’t really work out, you have another one to fall back to.  Make sure you don’t feel deflated if an idea doesn’t translate onto the page well, not every idea is going to be a home run.

Bullet pointing

Ok so you have your idea and are happy with it, what I like to do before jumping straight into writing the script is doing some good old fashioned bulled pointing.  This is a process that helps me massively when it comes around to writing as it gives you an arc to follow.  Think of names for your characters, make some notes and start with establishing the character development by bullet pointing their personality traits etc.  After that I always bullet point the ideas I have for screen progression, start with scene one and how you would like the film to start (it can be more than one idea for the scene) and progress through to the end.  You will end up with so many different ideas for the scene but this is where you start your plot development, you have a start and an end so you need to fill in the spaces in between.  A scripture jigsaw puzzle if you like, you have everything that is needed you just need to put it all together.

Dialogue

Undoubtedly the hardest thing I think about script writing is dialogue.  What I have noticed when reading scripts is that it is a lot harder that you would think to write down ‘how’ people speak.  A lot of the time it looks great on paper but when it comes to actually saying it, it doesn’t sound quite right.  So when you are writing your dialogue, say it out loud.  Does it sound right? As daft as it sounds do people actually speak like that?   

Organise and Colour Co-ordinate

This is really down to personal preference, I know a lot of people who don’t do this but for me it makes things a hell of a lot easier.  When I get to writing the script I use as different coloured ink for each scene I am working on.  The only reason I do this is so I can easily find where I need to be.  For example if I have a list of ideas, all ideas will be co-ordinated to the colour scheme being used for scene the idea is for.  You will obtain so many notes so this is an ideal way to keep on top of it and speed up the writing process.