As most people involved in the film biz know, the first stage of a film’s life (and this includes Shorts) is Development. And this formative stage is the most important stage for any proposed production. It’s longer than all the other stages, sometimes taking decades to either come to fruition or eventually fizzle out and die completely. Some films eventually find their way into production after a year or two, others never do. And it’s the Development stage I want to talk about because it’s actually the most creative stage of all, regardless of what happens during a film’s shoot. Development is the stage where all the ideas from published material and the imaginations of all the filmmakers involved are turned into a Screenplay. And they might be Writers, Directors, Actors, Editors and even Producers. It doesn’t matter so long as the culmination of all the creative ideas are forged into something filmable, something concrete.
At development stage before a movie can be called a movie, or whatever you wish to dub it – be it a ‘film’, a ‘picture’ or even a ‘flick’. The new production starts life merely as a ‘project’. And the driving force behind a project can come from anyone who wants to make a movie. Actors often have projects they would like to get produced. Producers have projects they think will have an audience and Directors have projects they believe will make great movies to inspire and entertain audiences. But it’s at the Development stage where a lot of projects get lost.
Because film is an art form, the collateral needed isn’t necessarily financial. Like all of the creative arts, creative ideas come from individuals who feel compelled to express an idea or feeling artistically. Painting and writing literature are the same, but these arts only require one person to execute their final works. Film is better compared to theatre when considering what elements are required to come to life as a piece of art. Both require a team of people in the form of a cast of actors and a crew of technicians. So the involvement of others in addition to a sole idea creator is a pre-requisite for successful film and theatre production. True it’s possible to make some films as sole artists – perhaps as animation, or video installation for exhibition, but to produce great cinema, the basic principles of theatre production are put into practice, only with more deeply realised storytelling that is akin to the depth found in literature.
If I want to stage an inspiring and entertaining play, I might write the script. If it’s my own distinctly original idea of how a play should be, then it will be necessary to write that script. Or perhaps I could pay a writer to do it for me. But paying a playwright is fraught with problems that will see multiple rewrites of things that I really ought to do myself, given that the original idea is my own. And what about the playwright’s own creative ideas? By employing a little personal skill in the art of scriptwriting, I can express my artistic idea in the form of a script and have a document on which to produce a new play from. If my ideas and will are strong enough, I may even direct the actors in how the play should be performed. And therefore, all I need to produce a play is one really good script. The very same principle applies to producing a film.
But the path to production from ‘script to screen’ as the popular phrase goes, can be a long and arduous one. ‘Development Hell’ is an old phrase used to describe a film project that has moved from the sequential phases of the Development stage where it was happily progressing towards Production, to a phase of languish, where something has gone wrong with some essential element of the project. It might be creative problems, it might be that key personnel that were intended to be involved have not been able to contribute, or it might be that financial support for the project is not forthcoming, or has been removed. In order to get out of this hell, the project’s problems need to be solved, or at least addressed and alternative options put in place if the project is to go ahead and reach the Production stage.
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