Storyline Development Workshop 2019

by | Jan 23, 2019 | My Blog

Assalamualaikum and a very good day to all of you wonderful people out there. I wish you all in good health in time of reading this post as we will embark on a new journey so incredible with lots of challenges and obstacles ahead of us this year. We have entered the fourth week of January 2019 and for some people they have sailed far to the middle of the ocean with various tasks around their waist. While others still in their green comfort zone without much task to manned as in time of this writing. To those who have shift to 5th gear, all the best to you buddy! And to those who haven’t start the engine yet, my advice is, GENTLEMAN, START YOUR ENGINE!
 Don’t hibernate for too long or you will lose precious moment!
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As a Producer who works in a Teaching & Learning environment, our video production work mostly related to the activities of education within the campus. From classroom recording, outdoor shooting, studio shooting, all of them are T&L oriented. So if you would like to do something else let say, making a short film, script writing, screenplay or sharing of ideas in filming production, it is BEST to do that with your own teammates who shared the same values as yours. In other words, you focus on your job at the office while at the same time still hunting for the things you loved most doing in hope that one day your film will get noticed by netizens around the world and they love it!. DON’T LOSE HOPE!
So, on the 10th of January 2019 I got an invitation from the Office of Corporate Affairs, UTM to attend their Storyline Development Workshop. To my knowledge, this could be the ticket for me to channeling my ideas on what’s best in developing a good storyline for the next video production projects for UTM. It turns out many of them sharing great ideas towards in making these low end video products. We have friends from the library (PSZ), Office of Research Alliance, UTMLead and the organiser itself. While most of them presenting their raw ideas with a Clerk in front of the PC typing mostly words that came out from our mouths, I knew on that particular moment what is my duty for the whole project. I’m not surprised! Because that’s what a Producer’s do. At least I could point out what is the missing ingredient before they jump into production stages which I think a big mistake if not having a proper pre-production planning right from the start.

LOGLINE: A CONCISE AND INFORMATIVE SUMMARY OF YOUR ENTIRE SCREENPLAY IN 20-30 WORDS.
Before we could jump into the pre-production checklist, first we must identify the LOGLINE of our short film. What is a LOGLINE anyway? Not all of us are graduated from film school or broadcasting studies. So if we could establish the LOGLINE from the beginning then we could craft our storyline into 3 Act Structure which will broken into 3 different parts. Act I (Setup), Act II (Confrontation), Act III (Resolution).
The Three-Act Structure in a film/short film.
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So, you see filmmaking is not something that you think it’s easy to be done. There are also science involved behind the scene which Screenwriters have to deal with in order to produce a film that can be sold or viewed by netizens out there. We should think again on how we could produce a better short film for UTM before going out there shoot aimlessly with a videocam or DSLR. Once we understand the basic ingredients of making a short film, then we could somehow clarifies and breakdown our story into 3 different parts. The more you watch a film on cinema, Television or Netflix the better your will become in terms of understanding a storyline especially on how they develop plot into twist and finally the climax of the film. The way we talk on how to develop ideas into story at all time seems to be pretty mixed with technicality such as camera movement, characters, location, the flashback, the scene, everything we want to share was thrown into one single rock to a flock of birds. Imagine the kind of task given to you in a raw form of idea and you have to develop that raw idea into a screenplay that can be understand both the management and technical side. Maybe it’s difficult for them to understand the screenplay part, but when you present them with a storyboard or shootboard, it’s going to be easy that way.
Once again, let us hope our next video project has the WOW factor in it, after what we have discussed on the previous storyline workshop. We want our final product could be competitive as local TVC out there although there will be big challenges ahead in making of those videos. We should put our best effort in it!
 Jeffri Rahman
Producer | Editor | Blogger
http://cubitsanasini.blogspot.my