7 Practical Things to Keep in Mind While you Write Your Indie Film Script

Lots of writing advice is good but leans towards the artistic rather than the technical. The script you write is going to form the backbone of your film. It will determine your budget, the scale of your project, the resources you will need, and paths for distribution and film festival submission. The following guide is not about how to write good characters, create fun story arcs, or save cats. It is a list of practical things I think you should keep in mind if you are a new filmmaker, someone working on a small budget, or both. You can thank me later.

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1. Number of Characters

More characters means more actors. More actors means hiring more people. Hiring more people means spending more money, feeding more people, dealing with more agents, handling more union and legal requirements, and potentially transporting and housing more people (see next point.) Try to keep characters to a handful or less, and avoid scenes where you will need crowds or lots of background actors you will also need to feed, pay, and coordinate.

2. Type of Locations

If you can, try to use locations you can get for free. Your friend’s house, public parks, where you work, etc. Consider that locations need to be set dressed, furnished, and maintained. If you have access to a sprawling mansion, skyscraper, abandoned tailer park, or mad scientist’s lab then that is great, but do not write a location into your script you do not either have at the ready for free, or know you can get for cheap. Additionally, try to get locations that are close to each other so you do not need to spend a lot of time and money transporting people around. Which brings us to…

3. Amount of Locations

This one is difficult for a lot of first time filmmakers to get their heads around, but you simply cannot have too many locations. A script where we start in Manhattan, go to Westchester, fly to Wisconsin, then go back to New York with several stops at hotels, bars, hospitals, jails, offices, and apartments along the way may be excellent, but it is also expensive and time consuming. Every time you move locations, that takes time. Depending on how far apart locations are, that takes time AND money. You are not just picking up and going somewhere, you are moving, housing, and feeding potentially several dozen people. This cuts in to how long you have to shoot the film, and how much money you have to shoot it overall. Few locations, close together, will save you.

4. Time Period

Sounds obvious but a lot of people forget about this. Do not set your film too far in the past unless you have the resources for costumes, props, and period-accurate locations. If you do, great! But work backwards. Write the Victorian-era script after you get the location for free. Make medieval short when your ten faire friend has costumes to spare. You are not a Hollywood studio, you are an indie filmmaker who is going to need every penny to spare. Do not write yourself into a film you cannot make.

5. Genre

This is where we start to get into considerations for festivals and distribution. If you want to have a chance at distributing or selling your movie, make a horror movie. If you want to get into big “Important” festivals make a drama. Look at festivals you want to get into and work backwards from there about what genre you want your film to be.

6. Length

1 page=1 minute of screen-time. It is a myth that short films are uniformly cheaper than feature length films. I have seen shorts cost tens of thousands of dollars, which with the right resource allocation could have been put into a feature. My own feature film was shot for around $100k, and a lot more shorts than you think cost that much money. Length of your project will also help determine where, if any, film festivals book you. Film programmers are trying to fit tight schedules, and are usually blocking around 5-15 minutes for shorts to fit into a shorts block, or 90-120 minutes for a feature. If your film is too long or too short a programmer may love it, but won’t be able to fit it into a program.

7. Personal Resources and Connections

I know it feels like I’ve brought up with point a few times but it is worth repeating in its own section. Before you set out to write your movie, consider the people you know and the resources you have available to you. If you know a great special effects person, that opens up a door of possibility for your story. If you have access to an insane looking location, that adds production value. If your friend is a musician with a good following, maybe them scoring the film will get more attention to it. These sound like they aren’t screenplay considerations, but they are. What you have available to you can all go into the story you want to tell, and how you want to tell it.