Making of a Short Film

Pre-production

In my film class, we started preparing for our short film to shoot by next semester. Our goal was to have a script ready by the end of first semester, which we did eventually (sort of) accomplish. Earlier in the year, we began with several ideas and it was apparent that as a class, we couldn't settle on just one and go with it.
We had difficulties staying interested in a story idea, up until we decided to base our story on a true story that happened to on of my classmate's family. As soon as we heard the whole situation, the news itself sounded like it already came straight out of a movie. 

Pre-writing

After unanimously agreeing with the idea, we set up a writing team which consisted of me and five others in the class to be in charge of writing a rough draft of the script. Before trying to type up the script on a document, we roughly sketched two timelines to keep track of the story and how the film will be shot. The first timeline we drew is of that actual story, how it plays out and when, in relation to each other. That one is just for our reference. Then our second timeline we made is how the story plays out in the film in chronological order.

Actually Writing

Once the timeline was done and we agreed on the plot, we started on the script. A few things I've learned during the writing process is that writing dialogue is HARD. And writing dialogue and simultaneously avoiding cliche's is even harder. But I've found writing the script and getting into the characters' heads is actually interesting and I genuinely enjoy getting to help decide what each character says or how the action plays, etc.

For our film we wrote a rough draft, mainly focusing on the action and leaving the dialogue to be fixed later when we go through the script as a class. So far, I'm pretty satisfied with our rough draft and think it will tell a very interesting, suspenseful storyline.