PR02: Story Ideas (1/3)

I already knew the kind of setting I wanted for my story - a western, with maybe some modern elements to stop it from being too cowboy-ish. I also wanted to many character to be a bounty hunter, because I thought that that would be a fun character to base the story around.

I wanted to keep in mind the things that I learned from researching short films, so I tried to think of what kinds of urgent goal the character might have that could drive the story - are they on a quest to retrieve something, do they want to save someone or are they just after money? I also tried to map out the kind of personality they may have, to determine what kind of goal and motive they were likely to have. My initial thought was to have some kind of cool, laid back, maybe almost lazy kind of character who prefers to do stuff on his own terms, which helped me make the list of flaws towards the bottom of the page

Why is the character a bounty hunter? Figuring out their life and motive will help me build a much more solid character, and should help me to determine what they would do in certain situations and why. This lead me to think of things related to their urgent goal and who I could get a twist ending from this - the lazy, cheeky kind of character is actually doing everything that they are doing for some nice, sweet kind of reason rather than just for pleasure or out of boredom, leaving the audience with positive feelings to take away with them.

I wanted to make the characters relatable through either his flaws or the things that happen to him. Since not everyone watching will share the same flaws even if it's common, I thought that making a list of bad things that could happen to a character would be a good way to help me think about relatable situations.

Obviously some are a bit more specific to this genre than to most people's real life, but I think that if you can tell how the character is feeling from that bit of misfortune that happened then the audience should be able to relate to that, at least. This could also help me with the comedy part of the genre and could be a possible starting point for the actual story.