Right, an outline. See, this is confusing because I suppose my idea of outlining comes from writing prose fiction, and it’s quite in-depth. But I guess that’s a matter of length. For a 15 minute short you’re not going to need three sides of A4, that’d be almost the whole thing. So writing a 300 word outline has been interesting. It’s highlighted to me that I know who my characters are, I know how they begin, I know my inciting incident, and I know where they end up, but I don’t really know how they get there. The next stage will obviously help me plan this in a bit more detail, but I can understand the process of going from one written document to the next, each time adding more detail, refining the story, ensuring it is planned and structured well. And the importance of not seeing each of these as finished things. They too can evolve and be updated so that, come the end of the process, this will still function as an outline for the film I write, despite inevitable alterations.
Week two: writing an outline
