Capturing Big Ideas for Less in Feature Film: How a Limited Environment Can Serve Substantial Themes

This book is an accessible guide, directed towards filmmakers with restricted resources and shortened schedules, who want to ensure their creation of riveting, fresh, and exciting projects. Whether a film is produced under a low or high budget, this text emphasizes that a small world coupled with a big idea can serve strong themes, complex characters, and powerful stories.

Award-winning screenwriter David Carren suffuses this book with his own, original Narrative Synonym Process, teaching readers how to redevelop and expand a single idea or element in a story into multiple directions. Each chapter examines case studies of successful films and screenplays that are suitable to the subject. Script to Screen entries evaluate specific scenes in well‑known films in relation to their dramatic intention and budgetary costs. The end of each chapter includes a review of its basic points and a bibliography citing the companies that produced the film, or the publishers of their scripts and/or where to find them, along with an exercise to allow the reader to directly enhance their knowledge and education.

Offering a variety of exercises throughout to allow the reader to directly enhance their knowledge and education, this text is an essential resource for film students, screenwriters and filmmakers who want to make strong, successful films from limited resources.

David Bennett Carren is an award-winning screenwriter whose work includes numerous episodes for such television shows as Star Trek: The Next Generation, Stargate SG1, and The Twilight Zone, among many others. His feature film script credits include Mr. Hell, Waiting for Sandoval, and The Red Queen, which he also directed. His recognition as a screenwriter and/or director includes a Writer’s Guild Award Nomination, a First Place in the New York Television and Film Festival, Grand Prizes in the Cynosure and StoryPro Awards, Platinum, Gold and Bronze Remi Awards, and a Silver Palm at the Mexico Film Festival.

His first screenwriting textbook, Next Level Screenwriting: Insights, Ideas and Inspiration for the Intermediate Screenwriter, which he wrote with David Landau, is available through Focal Press. A member of the Writers Guild of America and the University Film & Video Association, David earned his MFA in Screenwriting from Spalding University and is a Professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley where he has served as the Chair of the Department of Theatre.