How To Write a Movie in 21 Minutes

by Batman (writer), December 29, 2007

What if you had to make a movie in a week, or even less?

With all the do it yourself in a weekend type festivals cropping up, itâ€™s no longer practical to take your time to write a short film. When getting ready for something like The 168 Film Festival, time is of the essence. So, with apologies to Viki King, Iâ€™ve set out to enumerate the steps to take to write your movie quickly.
For the 168, youâ€™re provided with a theme. You get this long before your actual clock starts. Without doing any actual writing, you can be thinking on how the theme will relate to the verse you get when pre-production week starts. You can also round up your various locations, however, in a ten minute short film, you should probably limit yourself to two to three unique locations maximum.
As Iâ€™m sure you know, every movie has a beginning, middle and end. Or put more simply, setup, conflict, resolution. When you get your verse, the first step would be to look it up, and see how it applies to the theme. Then start brainstorming with your team, which should at this point consist of at least a writer, director, and producer. Hopefully you have a composer as well, who can be thinking about music for your film. A director of photography will also be helpful, as with his experience, he should be able to tell you the types of shots he can get in a relatively short amount of time.
As with Occamâ€™s Razor, your first instinct about what your movie should be about will almost always be the right one. Think about the number of characters youâ€™ll need for your story. The fewer the better, as with the time constraints for locations, the same can be said for the actors. In fact, your shoot time will increase exponentially with each additional character after the first few, so, make sure you really need them to tell your story.
A good definition of story is, something happens, and itâ€™s interesting. Of course, this will be different for everyone, as creativity is an art, and not a science. For me that boils down to this: The essence of drama is conflict, and the essence of character is action. Therefore, if you have characters in conflict while performing actions, youâ€™ll have created drama. You should also at this point decide what type of story you wish to tell. All my best scripts are comedies. That will probably be different for you. Write to your strength.
William Goldman once said, and I alluded to it before, that screenplays are structure. The setup involves what and who your story is about. The conflict boils down to, what's keeping them from achieving their goals, and the resolution solves the conflict, and hopefully, your hero has achieved his goal.
These are all choices you should be able to make relatively quickly. While you probably won't be able to write the screenplay itself in 21 minutes, you should be able to make the above choices in that time, as it really only took me a little over 20 minutes to crank this out.

See you at the movies!!!