Where to find ideas

It is safe to say that I am internally screaming as we start to work on this project. I feel as if everyone already has their idea chosen and ready to go and I barely know where to start! Like any other sane human being in the 20th century I resorted to the internet for help. I asked dear old Google if it could point me in the right direction to the land of ideas because I evidently was very lost. Thankfully I was pointed in the direction of this article by the name of 19 Great Ways to Brainstorm Short Film Ideas. As I am reading it I am finding that I simply do not have the ability to engage in some of the tips that were suggested in the article but I was able to find some useful ones throughout reading it.

The first tip was to work on the story a little bit every day. This is unfortunately not an option because I most likely need to decide on my story either this week or next week if I want to finish on time. So then, I went on to the next tip which was to write things down. I have heard this tip a million times before but I learned something new this time. I learned about something called the Alpha state which refers to those moments where you daydream when you are doing something mechanical or automatic. So now I know to be more attentive to my own thoughts while I am doing the most mundane of tasks like washing the dishes! I mean at this point anything helps. Moving on, the next tip suggested I could write about myself. This honestly is not a bad idea, I know we have all experienced crazy moments in our lives that we retell time and time again. So this time why not recreate one of those moments but only in a more dramatized and high definition way?

I'm not sure whose grandpa this is but I am sure
he's telling a very good joke that could be turned
into the plot of a very successful short film.

Then there was the suggestion of making a story out of an old grandad joke, which unfortunately is of no help to me since all of my grandparents live in Mexico. However, if anyone is willing to let me borrow their grandpa for a day so I can steal their jokes and make them into a movie it would be very much appreciated. Then the article kindly suggested that I could take an iconic story and flip the roles around to make it more interesting. This is definitely an option but I'm not sure if the AICE curriculum allows us to make parodies and turn them in as our projects. Either way, I am not sure if I would want to make a project like this as I don't believe that would be very creative.

Then I learned about Reverse Budgeting which is probably the most interesting of the tips as I

Robert Rodriguez-
"Reverse budgeting" technique

learned that Robert Rodriguez the director of "El Mariachi" utilized this same technique when developing his own story. The essence of it is to think of all of the resources you know you have easy access to or that you can purchase for cheap and then put them all together to make a story. This is honestly perfect considering my partner and I are just students and do not have a five million dollar budget. Then I stepped along the "what if..." technique which also seemed very viable since it is a simple starter to the questions that we make every day. Like what if I already had my idea right now? Maybe I wouldn't be so stressed. Anyways...

Lastly, I learned about the "press random article on Wikipedia" technique which could possibly pop up some useful or inspiring story. And then I learned about "K.I.S.S". Which is probably the most useful tip of all! Keep It Simple Stupid! Here I am overthinking my story for an unnatural amount of time when I could make something wonderful based on something mundane. So with those final words of wisdom, I am going to try and use these suggestions to come up with something AMAZING. So I will keep you guys updated.