When you’re developing your story idea, knowing what themes you want to explore can help you guide your research into the topic.  You want to find potential threads that re-affirm your concept, or find rebuttals and answers to the opposing viewpoint.

It can also help you define your narrative structure. For example, if your film is not seeking to answer a specific question but instead poses ideas or concepts and lets the viewer decide for themselves (think Hale County This Morning, This Evening), you may choose to eschew expert interviews for your film or pursue a non-traditional story structure.

Including your theme and thematic statement in your pitch decks also helps you explain precisely what you want to explore in your film and your viewpoint on it to potential funders.

Lastly, knowing your theme helps you develop your list of interviewees to get your point across and helps guide your interview questions so you can explore those themes.

Want to know what scenes you need to shoot, how to frame your shots, or when to film?  Your themes in the story can help you dictate these answers.

For example, if you are working on a film about identity and belonging, and your statement is “Despite the interconnectivity of our world, loneliness is only increasing,” you want to ensure that you demonstrate this through certain scenes and shots. As a very simplified example, you could include a shot of a person staring at their phone, chatting away on a messaging app, but all alone in the vast expanse of an empty room and looking sad.

Let your themes be your guiding light as you put your film together in the edit.  Whenever I’m stuck on a particular scene, I think back to the themes I want to portray in the film.  What does this scene need to say about the theme, and what’s the best way to illustrate that?  This helps me work through potential options for how to finish a scene.

You want to ensure that your film’s themes resonate with potential partners and, by extension, your target audience. Communicating exactly what your film is about helps you build your audience and find partners willing to help you get your film out into the world.

Absolutely, a film can have multiple themes running through it.  However, you should consider only having one central theme, then, depending on the film’s length, consider only including 2-3 sub-themes.  If you have too many competing themes running through your film, you risk confusing your audience with what the film is about.

I personally think this is one of the most important ways filmmakers can use themes in their work – differentiating your film from what has already been made.

There are so many documentaries being made every year worldwide that it is becoming more difficult to find original ways of telling stories.

But what if you were to take a common story and look at it from a different perspective?

For our film #MoCrazyStrong, that’s what we did.

There are plenty of films out there that focus on athlete recovery stories. They look at what the athlete had to do to bounce back from injury, compete again, or even just participate in their chosen activity. If they go a bit deeper than just the physical component, they may look at the mental struggle that goes on in recovery.

I knew that for #MoCrazyStrong, I wanted to go beyond the surface level of an athlete’s recovery story.

While the film is about resilience and overcoming adversity and injury, we chose to focus on the family’s role in caregiving to help Jamie, our main participant, recover and how her recovery, with her family’s help, helped shape the transformation of TBI care at Vancouver General Hospital.

I think focusing on those themes helped our film succeed on our film festival run, perhaps in places other films may not have.

So, next time you develop a film idea, consider how the themes and thematic statements you want to explore can differentiate your film from others in the same genre.