Let's play with dolls.
Ahem. They're action figures.
There was always a level of excitement and anticipation that started building somewhere deep inside me just before getting a new assignment from my college film production instructor. It was the thrill of a new creative endeavor; a chance to improve; an opportunity to add to my growing demo reel in hopes of one day landing a solid job at reputable production company.
On this particular day our instructor strode in to class and popped a DVD into the player. He wanted to show us one of his short films and use it as a launching pad to go over our next project. We watched and what we saw was a highly personal, introspective poetic film, slightly experimental in nature and full of random shots of everyday objects, juxtaposed in a non-linear fashion, metaphorically illustrating the thoughts of the narrator. It was interesting, but not exactly my cup of tea.
After the screening, he turned the lights on and told us that our next film would be comprised solely of tabletop elements; i.e. no live actors. The story and the script would be completely up to us. But no people. It was an interesting exercise for sure. As mentioned here before, I spent a lot of time as a kid making a lot of crazy, off-the-wall stuff, but it always involved me and my friends on camera acting out various roles. I had never produced any tabletop films. So, with a hearty cracking of the knuckles (not unlike the world-renowned concert pianist just before a performance) I sat with my team so we could start composing the concerto.
What came forth from our collective imaginations was certainly not the high-brow experimental art film that would make the soulful beret-wearing poets nod in appreciation. No, our film reflected the goofy and comedic (some might say immature, but not me) personas of the writers wielding the pen and the keyboard. And what we came up with was a coming-of-age story of a young, talented high school athlete who earns a scholarship to play D1 football, only to allow his immense ego and penchant for indulging in controlled substances, to wreck his opportunity.
The climactic scene of the film was an out-of-control college party where our main character (portrayed marvelously by a Ken doll) goes on a bender before realizing he’s hit rock bottom and needs to get his life back on track. We built a small set out of cardboard and dollhouse accessories and populated the scene with an assortment of dolls and action figures. Our shoot began late, late one night in my apartment living room and it wasn’t long before our antics roused one of my roommates who came out of his bedroom to A) find out what in the world was going on, and B) tell us to keep quiet. He was a Civil Engineering major and probably didn’t understand the pressure we film students were under to create such artistry with a bunch of kids’ toys.
After placating my roommate and promising to keep the noise level down, we finished our shoot and subsequently our edit. We were all pretty excited to screen the final film in front of our class. Ours received plenty of laughs, which was validating, but I couldn’t help notice something as I sat in class: every film had the same thematic. Oh sure, the execution was different, but each one (and I do mean each one) had a main character that succumbed to the ways of the world and got caught up in drugs and alcohol. And every film played it for laughs with the stereotypical trippy drug scene where viewers see things from the main character’s POV.
It was obvious that the entire class shared similar comedic sensibilities. Or maybe it was because we were all playing with dolls and the thought of corrupting innocent children’s toys was an irony too irresistible. Regardless, the lesson was obvious:
There are no new ideas.
No matter how creative you think you are, or how original you believe your idea, your story, or your script is, someone else has already thought of it or written it. That’s why there are so many existing tropes in film and TV. You will have to work hard to set yourself apart as a creator. And what will set you apart is not the originality of the idea (or lack thereof), but how you execute the idea; how you shape it into your own unique way of seeing the world around you. It’s how you draw inspiration from what you’ve seen before and build upon it to create something different. It’s not so much what you say but how you say it. The foundational elements of Star Wars weren’t original to George Lucas. After all:
Joseph Campbell had already talked about the hero’s journey in The Hero With a Thousand Faces in 1949.
Sci-Fi serials like Buck Rogers had already populated Saturday afternoon movie screens.
Westerns were already a well-established Hollywood genre.
Lucas just took elements from various literary and film sources and combined them into something different, and so it seemed new.* It was just a different way of speaking.
So, find your voice. Learn the language of film, of literature, of art, and then rephrase it into your own unique voice.
Just keep it down so you don’t wake your roommate. After all, he has an exam tomorrow.
*For a look at the influences behind Star Wars, check out this video from CineFix.