I subscribe to the Raindance newsletter and in an email recently there was a link to a series of posters for modern movies, reinterpreted as if they had come out many years ago.
Check it out here.
Besides being a fun waste of time, it does have relevance to screenwriting, in a roundabout way.
When I first started screenwriting, I was all about trying to get words on the page. It felt much easier to write the full story, without giving too much thought to a concise version – the logline. I figured that once I had it written in full, the logline would be easier to fashion.
My process now, however, is different.
From the likes of Blake Snyder in Save the Cat to Marvin Acuna of the Business of Show Institute, many stress the importance of crafting the simplest version of your story first. If you have a clear, compelling logline and a clear vision for the poster of your movie (there’s the relevance, see :-), it makes for an easier process writing.
Now, I try to craft a compelling logline first. This logline is then printed and taped on my monitor. This way, I’m more aware of making every scene and character work towards the fulfillment of the logline.
There will, hopefully, be fewer excursions up blind alleys, and fewer nonessential scenes or characters to cull in the rewriting process.
As of yet, I haven’t gone as far as creating the poster in Photoshop, but it would make for a cool document to have beside the monitor, too. It would involve some casting decisions, which could help with writing dialogue – even though it is unlikely the actors in my version of the poster would be the actual actors in the movie, if it was made!
Your writing process may be different. You may prefer a first draft of exploration and discovery. You may prefer simply seeing where the story takes you. But at some point, and I believe the earlier the better, you need to have a very clear vision of what your movie will be like.
Do you have a compelling logline close at hand for the movies you write? Can you see the poster in your mind’s eye?