Ideas Are Cheap
Having an idea is easy. Developing a concept is hard.
ARE YOU INTERESTED IN DEVELOPING YOUR DOC CONCEPT? Well, lucky you, because after I got such a good response to this piece, the good folks at Maine Media asked me to design a workshop around it! You can sign up here. Participants should bring an idea for a documentary, either one they’re already working on or a new idea, and we will workshop these as a group. Everyone will leave with an improved logline and a more focused concept for their film.
When asked, “Where do you get your ideas?” Stephen King sometimes answers, “Utica.”
It’s a good joke1 because every artist knows great ideas don’t just exist out there, waiting to be purchased like batteries or discovered like a patch of land.
Really, ideas are cheap. We all have them all day long.
The coin of the realm is really the concept.
An idea arises spontaneously, just like any other thought. On the other hand, a concept is built deliberately through a series of choices and constraints. The concept ultimately contains many ideas, from the form and structure to the audience(s) being served. The concept is the organizing principle that harnesses an idea and turns it into a work of art.
The conceptualization phase — in doc filmmaking we call this “development,” which is fitting, as we develop an idea into a concept — is the most important part of the filmmaking process.
It’s also the stage where most of us, and most of our films, fail.
Winning films have winning concepts
I really enjoyed this Sonny Bunch interview with Kevin Goetz, author of Audience-ology and How to Score in Hollywood. Goetz is a researcher and data analyst who runs one of the companies that do test screenings. I was intrigued to learn they also do concept testing. It’s Goetz’s contention — and I tend to agree — that 90% of films fail at the concept stage.
Of course, we all test our concepts all the time. We do it every time we answer the question, “What are you working on?” or “What’s your film about?” We test our concepts when we crowdfund, or apply for a grant, or pitch an exec.
But I doubt most of us are any good at actually learning from these experiences, in part because the feedback we get tends to be blunted by social niceties or obscured by an anonymous process, but also because it’s all so emotional we fail to actually collect the data.
In nonfiction, sometimes we want to rush past the conceptualization phase because we think — correctly! — that when dealing with reality, a lot of this will probably get sorted out in production and in the edit. (I’ll come back to this later.) But in a tight market, I think we can all see, more than ever, the importance of a winning concept. If you’ve been pitching lately, you’ll have heard the word “bulletproof” a lot. As in: your pitch has to be literally without flaws. A pretty high bar!!!
I was thinking about all of this at SXSW, where I saw two documentaries — Cookie Queens and #Skyking — that made me mutter jealously to myself, “Damn it to hell, I wish I’d had that idea.” But of course, saying that is no better than wishing I’d gone to the ideas store in Utica. Really, what I was responding to was how each of these films successfully developed their good ideas into brilliant concepts.
