Individual Project - Coming up with the Idea

For our individual projects we were assigned to shoot and edit a short film of our choice, being no shorter than 3 minutes and no longer than 8. I instantly decided I wanted to do a narrative drama type film as opposed to a documentary as I feel that I've rarely had the chance to create a film like this. This was perhaps a little bit of a brash decision as soon as I started thinking about it; I found it very difficult coming up with a story idea.

Coming Up With a Film Idea Proved Rather Tricky

This continued for a long while and I seemed to have some sort of creative block, that wouldn't allow me to think up any decent idea's that seemed original or simple enough to actually do. I managed to come up with a bunch of ideas that would have been perfect had I had a massive budget, large crew and actors. However this of course was not possible and the 'Die Hard' and 'Indiana Jones' type films I had in my head would just have to wait for when I do have a producer's budget. This became infuriating and I carried on picking my brains until a few days before our proposal deadline, where I eventually sat myself down and started to brainstorm some ideas.

Since my McClane and Indy Blockbuster would not be Feasible, I had to do some Brainstorming

The only half-decent idea I could think of was a short 'trailer' like TV film that if was shown in the real world, would have been developed for the Saturday night, teatime slot on terrestrial TV. I was thinking of something along the lines of 'Doctor Who', 'Robin Hood' or 'Primeval', all being family friendly dramas which if filmed by a student could be forgivable since they do have a certain 'cheese-factor' to them anyway. I rather reluctantly went with this idea for a while and even decided on a young 'James Bond' like character and plot, even though it has been done many times before (Stormbreaker, Spy Kids etc.) and lacked originality. However when it came to proposing this to other people in my class, even I doubted myself and within no time at all I ditched the idea and went back to square one.

Not Even Bond Himself would have Stood for a 'Cheese Factor' Saturday Slot!!

On the day of the proposal deadline I sat and heavily thought about what I could do and when it came to it, only two ideas were coming to mind. The first was a spoof of the film 'The Great Escape', having watched it recently with my Dad and honestly finding it rather dull. I felt it could be handled rather well as a spoof since it featured a lot of decent scenarios that could easily be changed to be comedic (it was at this point that I also decided to ignore that it had been done in the film 'Chicken Run' already). The second of my ideas came from my friend Dean who whilst talking about what i could do for my project, joked that he would find a film on egg's rather interesting. At first I laughed at his idea and found that my other idea could just turn as dull as the original film, but after a lot of thinking (and a much appreciated conversation with my Dad) I came to the conclusion that I could just connect the two and use both ideas.

And so 'The Great Egg Escape' was born...