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7 Proven Ways to Find Filmmaking Ideas (That Actually Stick)

Every filmmaker gets asked the same question eventually. Sometimes it comes from a curious friend, sometimes from a nervous newcomer at a workshop, and sometimes — if you’re honest — you ask it of yourself at two in the morning when the cursor is blinking and the page is empty.

Where do the ideas come from?

The truthful answer is: everywhere. And nowhere in particular. But that’s not especially helpful, so let’s dig a little deeper.

Start With What Moves You

The most reliable source of a good idea isn’t a clever concept or a marketable premise. It’s an emotional response to something that already exists. A film you saw. A song you can’t get out of your head. A TV show you watched twenty years ago that still sits with you.




One of my own projects in development, Two For The Road, started exactly there. Growing up, I was captivated by Tim Grundy and his cameraman — known simply as The Eye — in their Discovery Home & Leisure series Two’s Country. There was something magical about their dynamic: warm, funny, genuinely informative without ever feeling like it was trying to teach you anything. Tim was one of the greatest TV and radio presenters this country ever produced, and I wanted to do something that honoured that legacy. The idea for Two For The Road was born not from a gap in the market, but from love — for a show, for a style, for a man whose work deserved a tip of the hat.

That’s as good a reason to make something as any.

Chase a Feeling, Not Just a Story

Here’s something film schools don’t always tell you: you don’t have to start with a story. Sometimes you start with a feeling — a mood, an aesthetic, an atmosphere — and build the story around it afterwards.

Love and Other Lost Causes came from exactly that. I used to run a film festival in Folkestone, and one short film I screened stopped me in my tracks. Not necessarily because of the story, but because of how it felt — the grade, the texture, the emotional temperature of it. I knew immediately that I wanted to capture something of that feeling in my own work, even if the story I told was entirely different.

The actual plot of Love and Other Lost Causes came later — a two in the morning brainstorming session, as it happens (there’s something about that particular hour that loosens the creative mind). But the seed of it was purely sensory. If a piece of work makes you feel something, ask yourself why. Then ask whether you can make something that makes someone else feel the same way.

Let Other Art Forms In

Film doesn’t exist in isolation. The best filmmakers are readers, music lovers, theatre-goers, gallery wanderers. Ideas cross borders all the time, and some of the most interesting projects begin somewhere other than a screenplay.

My project Mr Midnight began with a Garth Brooks song. If you know the track, you’ll understand immediately why it sparked something. If you don’t, I’d suggest looking it up. What I took from it wasn’t the literal narrative but the emotional world it suggested — and from there, with my own creative licence, I’ve been building a story largely set inside a small local radio station. The first draft is in progress. The song remains on the playlist.

Music, in particular, is a gift to filmmakers. A great song can hand you a tone, a character, a world, or a theme in three and a half minutes. Don’t ignore it.

Practical Tips for Finding Your Idea

If you’re stuck, here are a few starting points worth trying:

Write down five things that have genuinely moved you in the last year — films, songs, books, overheard conversations, places, memories. Don’t filter. Just list them. Then look for the thread that connects them. That thread is probably something you care about deeply, and something you care about deeply is worth making something about.

Ask yourself what you haven’t seen. Not in a commercial sense — not “what’s missing from the marketplace” — but personally. What story do you wish existed? What character do you never see represented? What place, what moment, what feeling has never quite been captured on screen in a way that felt true to you?

Don’t wait for the perfect idea. Start with the good-enough idea and let it become something better in the writing and the development. Love and Other Lost Causes was a 2am brainstorm. Mr Midnight started as a feeling about a song. Two For The Road started as gratitude. None of them arrived fully formed.

The Idea Is Just the Beginning

Finding the idea is only the first step, of course. There’s the writing, the rewriting, the pre-production, the endless logistics of actually getting something made. Two For The Road is ready to shoot — we’re just locking in the dates. Love and Other Lost Causes is written and moving into pre-production. Mr Midnight is still taking shape on the page.

Each one started somewhere different. Each one started with a feeling that refused to go away.

That’s the real test of an idea worth pursuing: not whether it sounds good in a pitch, but whether it’s still there in the morning.

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Is This the End of Theatre? (Spoiler: No, But We Need to Talk)

Let me set the scene.

It’s a Friday or Saturday night — we don’t tend to put shows on midweek unless it’s panto season, when all bets and all weeknights are off. The house lights are about to go down, the cast are pacing backstage doing whatever it is actors do to summon the nerve to go on, and I’m standing in the foyer of the Tower Theatre doing the maths I try not to do too often. Tonight’s audience versus tonight’s costs. It’s not always a flattering equation.

If you work in theatre anywhere in the South East right now, you’ll know the feeling. Slower ticket sales. Shows pulled or rescheduled because the numbers simply don’t add up. Patrons who’d normally book without thinking twice now waiting until the last minute, watching their bank balance before they watch the curtain rise. It’s not dramatic in the way theatre is supposed to be dramatic. It’s just quietly, persistently harder than it used to be.

So is this it, then? Is the great British tradition of people putting on costumes in draughty halls and convincing other people to watch them finally winding down, defeated by energy bills and the price of a pint?

No. But we do need to have an honest conversation about why it feels that way, and what we can actually do about it.

The Bit Where I Show You Some Numbers (Don’t Worry, It’s Quick)

Here’s the genuinely strange thing about the current state of UK theatre nationally: more people are going than ever before. Over 37 million people attended theatres across the UK in 2025, with the West End alone welcoming a record-breaking 17.64 million theatregoers. Nationally, audiences aren’t the problem.

But here in the South East, that’s not quite the story on the ground — at least not this year. It’s worth being precise about that: the full-year national statistics are largely looking backwards, and don’t yet capture what’s actually happening right now. This year specifically, many of us have watched ticket sales slow noticeably, and more than a few shows across the region have had to be cancelled or rescheduled simply because the numbers didn’t stack up. The national picture and the local, current picture aren’t telling quite the same story, which makes it harder, not easier, to know what’s actually going on.

What both pictures agree on is the cost side. Production budgets have climbed steadily as labour, materials, energy, and building maintenance costs have increased, while theatres have largely held ticket prices steady to protect access. Translation: venues are eating the cost increases themselves rather than passing them on, which is admirable and also financially unsustainable in roughly equal measure. More than a third of theatres are forecasting an operating deficit this year, rising past half in the subsidised sector.

And that’s before you get to the funding picture, which is its own special kind of bleak. Public funding for arts and culture has dropped significantly per capita since 2010, with local authority contributions falling by as much as 48 per cent. Closer to home, the Astor Theatre in Deal — a proper community venue, not unlike ours — went public last year about a £20,000 shortfall, citing rising energy and supply costs squeezing them from every direction.

So nationally it’s “theatre has got harder and more expensive to make, just as people have less spare cash.” Here in the South East, we’re living that and watching the ticket sales dip on top of it. Two trends heading straight at each other like a particularly slow-motion car crash, with venues like ours caught in the middle, holding a clipboard and a slightly too-optimistic box office target.

What This Actually Looks Like From Where I’m Standing

The data is useful, but I work front of house, not in a spreadsheet, so let me tell you what it actually feels like.

This year so far we’ve put on Noises Off, Patio/Porch, and Dare to Dream Jr, with Two, Gypsy, Frankenstein and My Fair Lady still to come — My Fair Lady opens next Thursday. A real spread already, from farce to youth theatre to intimate drama, with a two-hander, a full-blown musical, and gothic horror still ahead of us — exactly the kind of varied programming a venue like ours should be proud of. And yet it’s been a noticeably harder year to fill seats than it has been in the past, with more of that variety still to sell. It’s the conversation with a regular who loves the show, genuinely does, but is now choosing between this and something else this month because they can’t do both. It’s watching a show that should sell out limp along at sixty per cent because people are booking later and later, holding out to see if anything more pressing comes up first. It’s the slightly sick feeling of having to have the “do we cancel or do we run it at a loss” conversation, which is a conversation nobody goes into theatre management hoping to have.

Panto is, as ever, the exception that proves the rule. Last year’s Jack and the Beanstalk did exactly what panto always does — packed the house, weeknights included, because pantomime occupies a strange and wonderful place in people’s budgets that other theatre doesn’t quite reach. This Christmas we’re bringing you Dick Whittington, and if history is anything to go by, it’ll once again be the one production of the year where the cost-of-living conversation politely steps aside for an hour and a half so everyone can boo the villain in peace. There’s probably a lesson in that, even if I haven’t fully worked out what it is yet.

None of this is anyone’s fault. Nobody’s villain here. People aren’t choosing not to come to the theatre because they’ve stopped caring about it — they’re choosing not to come because the heating bill won. That’s not a value judgement on theatre. That’s just maths, and maths doesn’t care how good your set design is.

So Can We Buck the Trend?

Yes. I genuinely believe that, and not in a forced “stay positive!” way that ignores the reality of the situation — more in a “we’ve actually got more tools than we think” way. Here’s where I think the fight gets won.

Make the price barrier softer, not lower. Slashing ticket prices isn’t sustainable when costs have gone the other way, but flexible pricing is genuinely effective. Pay-what-you-can performances, even just one per run, signal that you’re not trying to extract maximum value from people who don’t have it. Schemes like this have already shown that audiences from less affluent backgrounds, who are markedly less likely to attend otherwise, will come when the financial barrier is genuinely removed rather than just nudged.

Lean harder into community, because that’s the one thing the multiplex can’t compete with. A cinema chain cannot offer you the feeling of watching your neighbour’s kid nail their first ever solo line on stage. Community and amateur theatre has something the West End, for all its budget, doesn’t: people watching people they actually know. That’s not a consolation prize. That’s the entire point, and we undersell it constantly.

Marketing matters more than ever, and it’s relentless work. This isn’t a knock on anyone — marketing a theatre programme well is genuinely hard, thankless, never-finished work, and the people doing it across this industry deserve far more credit than they get. Audiences need to be told a show exists, repeatedly, in places they actually look, which means constant social media, local press, partnerships with other community groups — none of it flashy, all of it essential. I’ve huge respect for anyone holding that particular plate spinning, ours included.

And the best marketing isn’t ours to do at all. No poster, post, or press release beats a friend turning to you and saying “you have to see this.” Word of mouth is still the single most powerful tool in theatre’s box, and it doesn’t cost a venue a penny — it just needs patrons to actually use it. If you saw something you loved, tell someone. Tag the theatre, leave a review, mention it to a colleague over coffee, drag a reluctant partner along next time. Audiences have more power to keep their local theatre alive than most of them realise, and it costs nothing but a sentence.

Diversify what “coming to the theatre” means. Talks, workshops, youth productions, am-dram showcases, even just the bar being a nice place to sit on a Friday — every reason someone walks through the door that isn’t strictly “buy a ticket to a play” builds the habit of choosing you. Habit is worth more than any single sale.

Be honest with your audience about the squeeze. People are remarkably understanding when you tell them the truth. “We need your support to keep doing this” lands better than silence followed by sudden closure. The Astor Theatre’s crowdfunder worked, in part, because they said the quiet part out loud instead of pretending everything was fine until it very publicly wasn’t.

The Show Goes On (Probably With a Slightly Smaller Budget)

I don’t think we’re watching the end of theatre. I think we’re watching theatre get squeezed into proving, all over again, why it matters — and honestly, slightly annoyingly, I think it’ll manage it. It always has. Theatre has survived plagues, world wars, the invention of the television, and at least one period where everyone thought immersive Shakespeare in a car park was a good idea. It’ll survive this too.

But survival isn’t automatic, and it isn’t somebody else’s job. It’s box office numbers and bar takings and that one person who tells two friends about a show they loved. It’s every front of house manager doing slightly anxious maths in a foyer on a Friday, hoping the room fills up.

So if you’ve got a local theatre — and in Kent, you almost certainly have several rather good ones — go. Book the ticket. And don’t just think of it as plays, either. A venue like the Tower isn’t only Two and Gypsy and Frankenstein; it’s tribute acts that’ll have you up dancing, comedy nights that’ll have you in stitches, kids’ shows that’ll make a Saturday morning magic for someone small, and panto that’ll have the whole family booing a villain together. There is very likely something on at your local theatre this month that’s exactly what you fancy, whatever mood you’re in.

So go. Book the ticket, whatever it’s for. Bring someone who’s never been. Buy the interval ice cream even though it’s mysteriously the same price as a small car. Tell someone about it afterwards. It genuinely, actually helps more than you’d think — and it’s the difference between a theatre that survives this and one that quietly doesn’t.

What’s your local theatre, and what’s keeping you coming back — or keeping you away? I’d love to hear it in the comments.

*Gary is the Front of House Manager at the Tower Theatre in Folkestone, and has the spreadsheets to prove it.*

 

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Did I Do Something Very Bad In a Past Life?

Let me paint you a picture.

It’s morning. I’m sitting on the edge of the bed, sock in hand, preparing for what has become the daily ritual that most accurately summarises my relationship with my own body. My foot needs to reach the sock. The sock is approximately thirty centimetres away. This should not be a problem. It is, nonetheless, a significant problem.

What follows can only be described as a man attempting to kickstart a motorbike with his foot while simultaneously being electrocuted. There is lunging. There is twisting. There is a level of grim determination usually reserved for people attempting Everest. Eventually — eventually — the sock goes on. Victory.

This is my life now. And honestly? It’s the funniest part of my morning, right up until it isn’t.



I’ve been thinking lately about the accumulation of it all. The full inventory of what my body has put me through over the years, laid out plainly. Not for sympathy — I’m not built that way — but because I think there’s something worth saying about how you carry it. How you keep going. How you find the dark laugh in it when the alternative is just sitting with it, and sitting with it is no fun at all.

So here it is. The full list. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

In 2012 I had surgery for pectus excavatum — a congenital chest wall deformity where the breastbone sinks inward, asymmetrically in my case. The surgery to correct it is called the Ravitch procedure, and it is not, to put it mildly, a minor operation. My surgeon broke ten ribs and my sternum, repositioned everything, and held it all together with titanium bars. I was out of action for a year. A full year. I joke that I’m part robot now, which is true. That was the opening act.

Then there are the knees. Brittle cartilage, both of them, a gift I’m fairly confident I earned by jumping twelve to fifteen feet off Cleethorpes Pier onto the sand in my younger and considerably more stupid days. At the time it felt brilliant. My knees have been filing a formal complaint about it ever since.

Then, in 2019, came the diagnosis nobody wants: stage 4 SMZL — Splenic Marginal Zone Lymphoma. Cancer. I’ll let that land for a second. Six months of chemotherapy followed, ending in March 2020. Two weeks later, the country went into lockdown. I’d like to say the timing was darkly poetic. It was, in fact, just dark. The world shutting down precisely as I emerged from the other side of chemo — when you’re supposed to start rebuilding, seeing people, feeling human again — is something I don’t talk about much. But it happened, and it cost something.

It cost more than I realised at the time. Because my immune system had taken such a battering from the chemo, I had to shield for the entire first year of lockdown. I did not leave the four walls of my home for twelve months, other than a couple of hospital follow-up appointments. Twelve months. No fresh air, no wandering, no pub, no people. Just the walls, the silence, and a body I was still learning to live in after everything it had been through. I don’t say this to make anyone feel sorry for me. I say it because it happened, and it shaped things, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

The cancer is currently in remission. The less good news is that it’s incurable — I’ll carry it for the rest of my life, managing it, monitoring it, living alongside it like an uninvited lodger who won’t leave but has at least learned to keep the noise down. I’ve made my peace with it. You have to.

In February 2024, I tore a muscle in my back hauling ten-stone beer barrels at work. The tear itself was bad enough. What followed was worse: bone spurs developing along my spine, my body attempting to repair itself and making a fairly poor job of it. Now I live with constant pain. Some days it’s manageable — background noise, a dull ache I’ve learned to work around. Other days I can barely stand. The socks, as you now know, are every day regardless.

Four months later, in June 2024, I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Of course I was. At this point my body was clearly just working through a list.

And then there’s the ADHD. Not yet officially confirmed, but we’re heading there — the pieces fit too well to pretend otherwise. Here’s the thing about having ADHD when you also have a back injury that’s stripped most of the hyperactivity out of you: the H has largely gone quiet. My body isn’t bouncing off walls anymore. My brain, however, absolutely is. It will pick a song — usually, inexplicably, a McFly song — and play it on a loop for weeks. When I wake up. When I go to sleep. In my dreams, sometimes. Full production. No fade out. No mercy. Thank fuck I like McFly, genuinely, because I think a Coldplay phase would finish me off entirely.

And then there’s Sadie.

My wife lives with her own long-term chronic health conditions — I won’t share the details here because they’re hers to share, not mine — but what I will say is that managing my own health while also being her carer is something I carry with a lot of love and, occasionally, a lot of weight. I have a Carers Card. An actual, official Carers Card. I am, technically, a registered carer. If you’d told me that ten years ago I’d have laughed. Now I carry it in my wallet and feel, if anything, quietly proud of it. We look after each other. That’s what it comes down to.

So. Did I do something very bad in a past life? Statistically, it’s starting to feel that way. Titanium ribs. Lymphoma. Knees that haven’t forgiven me for a pier jump in my twenties. A back staging a slow mutiny. Diabetes. ADHD. A wife I love deeply and care for practically, every day.

The thing is, I don’t say any of this from a place of despair. I say it from a place of — I don’t know, exhausted honesty? There’s a version of this post where I wrap it up neatly with something about resilience and perspective and silver linings. But that would be a bit dishonest, and I’m not really in the business of performing okayness at the moment.

What I am in the business of is getting through the day. Doing the work I love. Looking after Sadie. And spending time with Reggie — our three-legged cat, adopted at the end of April, who has brought more light into this house than I can properly explain. He gets around better on three legs than I currently do on two, which says something, though I’m not entirely sure what. He also likes to help me write. Daily. Usually by walking across the keyboard at a critical moment and contributing a paragraph of his own — ggggggggggggg, typically, or perhaps xxxxxcccc if he’s feeling creative. I’ve learned to save regularly. He has not learned to care.

And talking about it. Because I think a lot of people are carrying their own version of this list — the accumulation of things, the ways their body has let them down or surprised them or just refused to cooperate — and not saying much about it. So consider this me saying something.

What’s on your list? Drop it in the comments. I’d genuinely love to know I’m not the only one having a one-sided argument with my own spine every morning.

*Gary is a designer, developer, theatre FOH Manager, and occasional filmmaker songwriter based in Dover, Kent. He puts his socks on every day. It takes a while.*

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Lockdown Blues Part Three

Here we are in the third week of the third national lockdown. For the third time another period of time being stuck indoors with nothing better to do than twiddle the thumbs and watch endless reruns of The Walking Dead, Z-Nation, Friends, Humans, Star Trek and Nashville. Oh, and that inauguration.

Folkestone is a place where nothing ever happens

Coley Heaven

Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens. Nathan Coley. Photo by Thierry Bal.

Every time I blog I promise I’ll blog more often. It never happens. I think I have a valid excuse this time though, literally nothing has happened in the life of Gary since the last time I sat down to write on here. OK so I may have written a bit more on the Western film script and got involved in the launch of a game server but other than that…

Folkestone is a wonderful place to live, so many things to see, places to go, establishments to eat and drink at, but not during a national lockdown. I’m only allowed one exercise walk per day and the rest of the time I’m expected to sit in the house and entertain myself. So for the past three weeks my life has literally been get up, do a bit of writing, play a game or two on the PC or Playstation, go for a walk, eat, play some more, go to bed. My wife still goes out to work every day as she’s a key worker but I’m shielding so I don’t even have work to go to that would help pass the time.

Good news on the health front

I did get a bit of good news back in December, after more blood tests it was declared I’m still in remission which means I have six more months worry-free before the next load of tests in June. I also had another consultation with the cardiothoracic surgeon who still wants to open my chest up again to fix the broken bits of my ribcage after my failed Pectus Excavatum surgery in 2012. The surgery has been postponed though until at least the summer because, you guessed it, Covid-19.  During lockdown I seemed to have gained another condition that doesn’t look like it’s going to get better any time soon, Lockdown Belly, or as some like to call it my Covid Curves. I really need Covid to disappear soon so I can rejoin the gym. I cancelled my membership after my cancer diagnosis and when I got the all-clear we were in our first national lockdown so I haven’t rejoined since.

Biden and Bye Bye Baby

It looks like the USA are heading back in the right direction following the election and inauguration of Joe Biden. Trump was perhaps the worst president in US history, the whole world could see it but half of America thought he was a (false) messiah. Even a large number of Republicans have turned against him but his strong “army” of followers have set a dangerous precedent and threatened the very concept of democracy. As a Brit it’s easy to see from the outside just how dangerous he was (and still is) with his lies and attitude. But enough about US politics, I’m sure we’ve all heard enough. I just hope the US now heals and puts right all the wrongs of the last four years. And didn’t Garth Brooks do a great job!

Gaming in the Wild West

Apparently it’s now good for your mental health to play games. A study by Oxford University academics “found that people who played more games tended to report greater “wellbeing”, casting further doubt on reports that video gaming can harm mental health”. Well that’s a bloody good job isn’t it, it’s pretty much all I’ve been doing since Christmas.

I’ve also gotten involved in the launch of a new server for roleplaying games. We’re launching a Red Dead Redemption 2 Online server for people to roleplay. I’ve been busy working on the marketing and gameplay side of things while my friend has been working with developers to create the scripts and mods required to play the game. We’re hoping to beta test the server towards the end of summer before an official launch towards the end of the year. I already have my character name for when it does go live, Morgan Reed, he is the main protagonist in my The Lawman Legacy movie script. I will not be playing him in the movie though, I have someone else in mind, someone very well known who was one of the regular actors in one of the TV shows I mentioned in the first paragraph. If you can guess who he is (write your guess in the comments below) I will use your name for another character in the movie. There are three prominent characters in the movie who I still haven’t officially named. Should the server be successful we may expand into hosting other online RP games in the future.

Wrap-up

So a fairly unproductive few months here in the JJ household, here’s hoping things return to normal soon. I hope you all are staying safe, wearing your masks, washing your hands, staying home, etc, etc, etc. Once the vaccine has been fully rolled out to everyone I hope we can consign Covid-19 to the history books. I won’t hold my breath though as long as Boris is in charge…

 

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