Bibiti from amer nazri on Vimeo.
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I’ve been thinking about a process for radically reducing the time and effort of getting from A to Z film-making wise. Part of it involves a story-writing loop… that looks like this:
So there’s a Brother’s Grimm part of the cycle… the bit where you sit down and go “once upon a time, there were 3 bears”. Tell the whole story verbally – probably a couple of pages worth. When that’s done, you distill it to an elevator-pitch, revist the themes and character arcs… if they’re not expressed, then redo the Brother’s Grimm bit. Keep shit simple. Don’t sit down in front of an empty screenplay that’s going to run to over 100 pages. Rewrite early.
I think this is a linear process. It’s cyclical. Perculatory. Once you’ve “finished” one bit, you go to the next bit and rewrite… adjust etc… all of which you do before you get to screenplay. Because you never actually do a screen-play.
Instead of a screenplay, you have beats/arcs within a scene… things that have to happen for the plot/themes to turn… you do a storyboard not by drawing stuff, but by getting people to actually stand in the actual scene, then photograph it – so storyboard is an outcome of blocking… so when you shoot for real, your actors/people are winging it off a storyboard rather than a script.
And then you shoot for real… then you give everyone an hour off, and do a rough-edit on a laptop, on the spot… If there’s anything that needs fixing or redoing, fix it or redo it when everyone comes back.
That’s the theory anyway.
But anyway – part of the process is a Brother’s Grimm version of the story. Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away…
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