Hi Im 18 and began an interest in making films when I was 7 when I tried writting and filming for a horror film, no success was made of that. Since I bought my own digital camcorder three years ago I have been able to carry on with my dream of making my own films. With very little plot and script work to think of and without the proper editing equipment at the time, I took a role of recording anything to make music videos. Usually a music video is a promotional film for an artist to promote their music but I thought of it as a way of putting my life in pictures. Using new digital camcorder to film things like nature, the places were I live, friends, expressions on peoples faces...which I found really important to protray a feeling, off the cuff moments, rivers, birds practicaly anything interesting and I would master the art of filming from different angles, lighting, speed in which to zoom, special effects....when filming I was only able to film using only the effects I had on my camera as I did not have a pc at the time to edit, so I had to be very carefull in filming the right things in the right time. After filming I would go home, connect the camera to the analogue mixer, take away the sound and add an appropriate track of my choice over it. because i couldnt edit the pictures I had to skip through a few songs to make the music fit in with the film.
Anyway now I have a pc and a reasonable editing system I can now make films more professinaly, well when I say films I have only made a few music videos, a one minute film, half an hours worth of comedy sketches. My next task is to make a film with a story which lasts just over or even longer over half an hour. My friends arent into films as much as me but I could get them to act a few lines every now and again which would make filming take ages. Any ideas people??? Ideas I have would be something like...appropriate drama, as in talking etc, comedy, adventure...I may end up focusing on this one but dont know yet.

Dramas are easier for people who don't have a huge budget.

You shouldn't try to fit an idea into a certain time slot. you should come up with ideas, and then see which one of them would take as long as half an hour to tell.

i mean if you really sit down and disect your idea, you can see that the idea may only be a 30 second idea or a 30 hour idea (television season).

i think you'll be happier with the results if you just let the story play itself out to the length it wants to rather than you forcing it to be a certain length.

(it will get longer or shorter during editing anyway, unless you very exactly write and shoot, but only television and commercial people do that, and it's pretty much filling out a template)