Capturing Big Ideas for Less in Feature Film : How a Limited Environment Can Serve Substantial Themes

This book is an accessible guide, directed towards filmmakers with restricted resources and shortened schedules, who want to ensure their creation of riveting, fresh, and exciting projects. Whether a film is produced under a low or high budget, this text emphasizes that a small world coupled with a big idea can serve strong themes, complex characters, and powerful stories.

Award-winning screenwriter David Carren suffuses this book with his own, original Narrative Synonym Process, teaching readers how to redevelop and expand a single idea or element in a story into multiple directions. Each chapter examines case studies of successful films and screenplays that are suitable to the subject. Script to Screen entries evaluate specific scenes in well-known films in relation to their dramatic intention and budgetary costs. The end of each chapter includes a review of its basic points and a bibliography citing the companies that produced the film, or the publishers of their scripts and/or where to find them, along with an exercise to allow the reader to directly enhance their knowledge and education.

Offering a variety of exercises throughout to allow the reader to directly enhance their knowledge and education, this text is an essential resource for film students, screenwriters and filmmakers who want to make strong, successful films from limited resources.