Where Do Ideas Come From?

The most direct path for developing ideas comes from knowing your concept first. If you know what your piece is about, it is easy to determine early on which elements you need to tell your story: the situation that will best convey your message, the characters that will be in conflict with your situation, and then, your genre, time period, lighting, costuming, and everything else.

This is the most straightforward approach because your theme or concept is what drives everything else in your piece. It is the sounding board against which you place your possibilities and if your possibilities do not support your concept, you eliminate them.

More often than not, we start with a seed or inspiration from somewhere or something else. It could be a character design we have drawn, a location we have seen or a situation we have experienced.

When starting with a character, you will need to figure out home the character is and then fabricate a situation that will put him in conflict.

When starting with a location, you need to discover why you are attracted to it and what potential has for story. Populate it with characters. What do they do there? What would disrupt what they usually do? If the location is generally familiar, what has changed or what is out of place that creates implication or questions in your audience's mind? What is the atmosphere of the place and what does that mean?

When starting with a situation, you have to create conflict. Two people at a table having a conversation is a situation. Two people at a table fighting over the check is a conflict. To make this stronger, there has to be something at stake. What does it mean to each of these characters if he or she does not pay the bill for the other? What are the extremes that the characters go to win the conflict?

Ideas for the Animated Short: Finding and Building Stories, by Karen Sullivan, Gary Schumer and Kate Alexander. Published by Focal Press, Elsevier Inc, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-240-80860-4, page 46-51.