You can make great movies if you find out what makes you different. Be yourself and put your own fingerprint on your movies. Forget about finding a unique new story or blend of other stories. The trick to being original is simply to give people your own unique way of seeing things. It’s not what you say; it’s the way that you say it.
Here are nine simple ways to make your movie yours:
1. Follow your instincts. This means relying on your instinctive, snap decisions. Trust and learn to follow your first impressions and your instincts. If an idea grabs you, chase it.
2. Avoid emulating other people. The problem with having a big movie collection on your shelf is that it is hard not to be influenced by what you see. If you want more original ideas that are uniquely yours, focus on anything in any art form other than movies. Look at short stories, radio, songs, comics—anything except movies.
3. Focus on your own experiences. You don’t need to make your movies autobiographical—most people don’t feel that comfortable with having their real lives splashed up on the screen. But use locations and people familiar to you, giving a made-up story a realistic edge. Or you can use a single moment you experienced and reinvent it somewhere else. Luke Skywalker—stuck in a nowhere town on Tatooine and yearning to travel fast and far—is arguably his creator George Lucas returning to his own small-town youth and love of fast cars. This grain of truth makes it something we can all relate to.
4. Don’t think about the outcome. One sure way to stay true to yourself is to focus on the day-to-day process of making your movie, rather than how it’s all going to look when it’s done. Keep your thoughts on the here and now, looking at how to deal with each small hurdle each day.
5. Mix and sample. Take a look at what is in the news, or ask other people what they are hung up about, what scares them right now. A good way to take your ideas further while still being yourself is to use small parts of your own experiences and mix them with bigger, wider ones—those which make up the zeitgeist. Can you merge these ideas with what you have gone through? Or mix them with genre movies? The results could be interesting—as in George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, which mixes zombies with Romero’s own feelings about consumerism. Or apply your own experiences to a completely different setting—such as Blue Velvet, where a coming-of-age movie gets transplanted into a surreal nightmare setting.
6. Next up, look at the techniques you use to make movies. Technique means the way you shoot, edit, light, and all the rest, and it’s where most filmmakers tend to fall over in their desire to copy other filmmakers. The techniques you use should only arise from your main theme. Everything can come from that first germ of an idea. Play around with every different way of doing things until you know you find the one that’s right for you.
7. Next, pitch it to a few people and get reactions. You might find that on each telling the story gets refined and sharpened. The bits that are not important to you get left out and you focus on the essentials.
8. It’s fine to get feedback about your movie. It won’t be so weak that any contact with the outside world destroys it. If it feels too vulnerable to people’s comments then it needs to return to paper and get mapped out some more. Listen to what people say about your movie, write down their comments, and then later settle on which ones you like and don’t like.
9. Next, work with actors to improvise the script and add more ideas as you work with it.
Excerpted from Stand-Out Shorts: Shooting and Sharing Your Films Online by Russell Evans, © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights Reserved.
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