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FilmSkool — a free film school

Brainstorm SHORT FILM IDEAS: How to Come Up With 100% Unique Ideas | Script Reader Pro

A script-reading professional walks through concrete brainstorming techniques for generating short film premises that are small enough to work in ten pages but still emotionally specific. Aimed at writers staring at a blank page with no starting point.

Script Reader Pro · 11 min · Beginner · SCR · Screenwriting · 2023

What you take away

Test any short film idea by asking if it's really one scene's worth of change — if it needs more, it's a feature idea in disguise.

Watch it

Filed under

Oscar winners for screenplay

Books on screenwriting

Writing Short Films — Linda J. Cowgill
Making Short Films — Clifford Thurlow
Writing for Emotional Impact — Karl Iglesias
Writing in Pictures — Joseph McBride
Tales from the Script — Peter Hanson, Paul Robert Herman
Crafty Screenwriting — Alex Epstein

Kit for this lesson

Panasonic LUMIX S5 II — Full-frame, open gate, phase detect at last
Panasonic LUMIX S5 IIX — The S5 II with raw out and ProRes internal
Sony a7 IV — The all-round full-frame hybrid
Canon EOS R6 Mark II — The affordable full-frame RF hybrid
Nikon Z6 III — Partially stacked sensor, N-RAW internal
Rode Blimp — Wind protection and a shock mount in one

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