So...How long should a movie be?
This is an area that trips up a lot of people.
One of the biggest rookie mistakes that beginning filmmakers make is that they try to stuff everything into their movie and end up with a six hour monster. Problem is, most beginning filmmakers don't have the experience or the skills to pull something like this off and they end up with a muddled disaster.
So, what you want to do, when first starting out, is make the film shorter than you actually want to make it. Leave the audience wanting more...even a sequel. In fact, you might want to leave the ending of the movie open ended so that it lends itself to a sequel. You can never give the audience too little, but you can give them too much.
What you should do is map out your whole movie ahead of time with storyboards.
For example, let's take this murder mystery.
1. Murder is committed.
2. Police arrive on scene.
3. Investigation begins.
4. Suspects are questioned.
5. Clues begin to surface.
6. Hint of who murderer is surfaces.
7. Final clue reveals murderer.
8. Murderer is hunted and caught.
It's basic, but you get the idea. Then, after you have your storyboard designed, you fill in the pieces as sparsely as possible. Don't drag things out.
If you find your storyboard is pages long, then your movie is probably way too long to begin with. Storyboards should be relatively short and simple.
Think Hitchcock. Short and to the point.
Peace,
Shane
www.FilmMakingOnaBudget.info
Yeah, I had an interesting experience recently when I tried adapting my own novel to a screenplay; I'd always though the novel was a bit short, but I wasn't even half-way through the story before the screenplay had reached 100 pages.
Filling 100 pages with story seems like a lot to a newbie, but when you actually start writing it goes real fast.
It seems to be that it takes greater skill to re-write than to write. The point being, re-write should focus on trimming the fat and eliminating every single word of dialogue that doesn't drive the story forward.
It's funny how sometimes when you "summarize" an article or movie it actually ends up LONGER! 🙂
But good point about trimming the fat. Every scene has to be important. If the scene is NOT important...CUT!
For those of you that went to college, you'll remember this from English 102. Every scene (sentence) needs to be important to the story. Otherwise your viewers (readers) get bored or side tracked.
Best of luck to ya.
Peace,
Shane
www.FilmMakingOnaBudget.info
