Alexander Tullo
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How I Begin Writing A Film (Pt. 2)
🕑 Added 2025-07-21 16:06:00 +0000 UTCHello everyone!
In my Pt. 1 post, I spoke about finding the thematic tone for the film; your Day 1.
Today, I'm going to talk about how you turn that into a series of hooks that will lead to having the seed of your idea.
Day 2
So let's set ourselves up with a tone. In Pt. 1, I told you to chose 3 films that together describe the taste of your idea. In this example, let's say 3 fairly well known films.
The fantastical world building and magic of Howl's Moving Castle
meets the old-school sci-fi of Ghost in the Shell
with the real-world approach to an impossible event, as seen in Shin Godzilla (2016)
That last one is slightly lesser known but I do love this film, so maybe it'll encourage all of you to watch it, haha.
So fantastical themes, in old school sci fi, with a governmental, authoritative POV. We can work with this.
From here, I'd like to write a list of common symbols, concepts, themes, etc, that appear in all these films. They can be very simple visual images or items, or very conceptual.
Walking buildings,
Clones,
Guns and shooting,
Objects coming to life,
Monsters,
Police,
Terrorists,
Witches and wizards,
Kings and queens,
and wars.
Awesome, love it.
From here, imagine as if you have one of those cork boards with the red strings that we see in the films. What connections can we draw, where the string act as conflict?
(What do I mean by this?)
- Just saying, "I want a story about police clones" is not good. Why?
A good hook--the thing we're all searching so ferociously for--comes from a good conflict.
- A good hook would be, "I want a story about a clone struggling to join the police force of real people."
- Or even better-- "I want a story about a clone that doesn't know it's a clone, struggling to join to join a police force that specifically hunts down clones."
Oops, we're treading on Blade Runner now. But you get the idea.
If you need another example of this, look at the hook of one of the best movies, ever.
- Bad hook: "Story about a rat." (No conflict)
- Good hook: "Story about a rat who is stuck in a french kitchen." (Nice, fun conflict putting a rat in a kitchen, except we're seeing it from the rat's POV)
- Better hook: "Story about a rat stuck in a french kitchen who just wants to cook gourmet cuisine" (This is flipping the view we have of a rat on it's head and creating emotional and visual conflict)
You get the idea.
So let's go back to our tone and find some hooks.
"Cities run by AI get omnipotence and want to eject their own citizens, but under what right?"
"Terrorists known as "witches" and "wizards" try to overthrow their government, but maybe for good reason"
"The future government is run by kings and queens, but they're all clones that keep getting reincarnated."
These are all seeds of ideas, not to mention I thought of them very quickly, but you can see how I took themes from all 3 movies to create them. This should be your next step.
In the next part, I'll take one idea and show you how to expand upon it and develop it into a proper story with depth and resolution!
