Refining your Concept

By now you’ve developed your concept for your film. For our example, it’s still about the Florida manatee. You want your target audience to help save them after watching your film. To accomplish that goal, take a moment to review your goals, target audience, story, and take-home message. Close your eyes and let all those elements simmer in your creative consciousness for a while. Better yet, swap ideas with your production team about how to best refine the concept and present it. Your main goal here is to creatively think-tank about what presentation slant or method will best tell your story while connecting solidly with our target audience.

If you have a financial partner (someone funding your production), by all means include them in the concept refinement process. When we typically produce science or wildlife films supported by a company or organization, we’ll have a face-to-face with the financial partner to brainstorm concept development. Like other parts of the planning process, it helps to make an outline. Let’s pretend our financial partner is a supporter of the saving manatees group. We would meet with their educational staff or communication directors to begin discussing and jotting down ideas. The outline may look like this:

  • Main theme – harmless manatees are defenseless against increasing man-made threats to their survival
  • Style of presentation – POV, Use host to take audience by the hand on first-person discovery into the world of the manatee, then back to the scientific world of humans with various experts expressing different points of view
  • How to hook the viewer – Begin with snorkel adventure into manatees’ secret lair and surface, posing the big question.
  • Shift from love to fear – We no sooner fall in love with these gentle giants up close when we begin to discover fearful clues that something is horribly wrong…
  • Discover science - social content with different experts with actual field investigations and interviews
  • Reconnect manatees with audience by looking closer at impacts of threats – now it’s getting personal as we see the ill effects.
  • Back to other experts on possible solutions to threats
  • Need a light at the end of the tunnel – find glimmer of hope through positive action and wrapping up with an affirmative take-home message

Though this looks like a story-line, it’s really more of an expanded outline of the elements that you’ll tap into to develop your story-line. This is the part of your planning that further defines your concept by using the power of theme, slant, and the psychological approaches of how to reveal your story powerfully to your audience. This list will also serve as a springboard to the next section… research.