Big Idea

"No one goes to Hollywood with the intention of making a bad movie."
Harvey Harrison, a professor in my college, once told the class.

Hollywood wants to make marketable films and they want them to be big, hence the Big Idea concepts were developed. These are stories that can be summarized in a sentence but are massive in scope. My favorite, what if a gun had a heart? Iron Giant.

All this past week I attended a series of lectures that described the concept of the big idea and it got me thinking, what if our ideas where small and we just nurtured them to grow? Brad Bird once said that it is hard to sale a film in Hollywood because most execs evaluate concepts with charts and focus groups, because they want to be safe in their investment, but that honest stories where usually small in concept and huge in heart. Like Ratatouille is about a mouse that Cooks (He said something a long those lines, not the exact quote)

This was inspired by that concept, he is trying to catch the big idea but instead caught a small one, should he let it go or nourish it for growth?

Just a thought.