Mind-Mapping Your Project

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Mind-Mapping Your Project

Creating Your Film or Television Project by Mind-mapping

I’ve been asked lots of questions from people about not knowing how to start their film or television projects. Many of you have amazing ideas that you want to someday share with a broader audience, but feel overwhelmed as to where to start it. In my book, #100Pitches: Mistakes I’ve Made So You Don’t Have To, I talk about the strategy I use to develop my projects and pitch them. It’s a 3 step process: Create, Prepare, and Pitch. With every step, I do a mind-map. I’ve decided to briefly walk you through a process of how I create the world of my projects through mind-mapping. In the book, I go into a more detailed step-by-step process (I do this in my pitching bootcamps as well), but below I describe the nuts and bolts and give examples.

The first thing I suggest doing is mind-mapping your project to simplify it! For many, a film, TV, or even book project is too big to look at as a whole. It’s overwhelming. So, what you need to do is break it down into chunks by mind-mapping.

Start by writing the title of your project in the center of a page. Then start brainstorming everything you want to include in your project by drawing lines from the title to your thoughts. Don’t hold back; just dump your thoughts freely. If it is a film, digital or tv show, it can be characters, themes, scenes, locations, moods, background, style elements and many other things can be included depending on your project. If it is a book, it can be chapter titles, themes, situations, and/or anecdotes you want to tell.

After you are done, you will begin to chunk all of the things that are similar together. You can either draw a circle around all of the things that fall into the same category, or you could categorize by giving everything a title and putting under the title everything that goes together.

Examples:

Chapter titles/topics:

  • When I started my journey
  • Discouragement
  • Rising above obstacles

Anecdotes if a book:

  • Story of my childhood
  • Story of my biggest challenge

Act 1:

  • Opens with Amy Adams packing to leave for the marines
  • Amy goes out for one last soirĂ©e with friends
  • Amy’s boyfriend dumps her

Act 2:

  • Amy grows close with others in her unit
  • Amy in marines, sees her best friend gunned down, she never said she loves him.
  • Amy gets hurt in an attack

You get the point!

Spend time mind mapping your project. It will help get your thoughts together and the project won’t seem so overwhelming.

I hope this helps some of you. I pray it alleviate any fears you may have about starting your projects and preparing to pitch.

Feel free to join my private pitching Facebook group HERE!

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