Feature Article: Short filmmaking

Making short movies is the best way to learn about the whole process. If you have never made a film before, this is the ideal starting point to picking up the right skills, finding out how different pieces of equipment work and generally going through the experience of putting your ideas into pictures.

What are short movies?

A short movie lasts anything between one and ten minutes, though some are longer. Shorts tend to be the preferred type of movie for students and amateur filmmakers, often because of the expense or time involved in making feature films. But shorts are a particular kind of film in their own right; they often have a very different structure to features, can be more experimental, more radical, less traditional. Most importantly perhaps, they are the only real way to get your filmmaking voice heard in a tough industry; if you want to finance a feature film, you may spend years developing the necessary threads of financial support but still end up with few interested contacts. A short will be an easier way to get your work seen with the range of web film sites growing year on year (among them Atom, and Ifilm) each of whom only take shorts, showing them to a potential global audience.

What kind of material makes a short?

Any subject will make a good short but it undoubtedly lends itself to succinct forms of storytelling, ideas that you might find in short news articles or short stories or in poems. In a feature film you have the luxury of being able to develop a plot, introduce us to characters and generally adopt a more meditative, less action-oriented tone. You can develop side-stories, include a sub-text to add more meaning and play around with the overall structure of your movie. In shorts, you may have to cut to the chase and use a deft touch to show us who the characters are and what their roles are in the movie. In a sense, this can let you off the hook a little in that you can get straight down to the story in the knowledge that the audience are going to continue watching since it only lasts a few minutes. You can try out ideas that feature films can’t use, playing with the audience’s expectations and perhaps introducing them to new ways of looking at films.

Similarly, the length of the film also allows you to adopt a more personal approach. Your own personal style can be developed here whereas in feature films you are restricted by an array of conventions if you want the chance to get it seen in cinemas, which given the extent to which American films dominate other domestic cinemas, may be increasingly difficult in any case.

Where can shorts be seen?

While it is true that almost no funding is available for making shorts unless you investigate public arts sponsorship, shorts have more of a chance of getting seen now than at any point since the abolition of a leverage in the UK which channeled funds directly to short movies. The most likely place to get your short movie seen is on one of the many online cinemas. A list of these is elsewhere on this menu. Simply fill out their online application form and send them a copy of your movie on DV tape or VHS (DV is preferred). They do the compression (squashing it down to size so that it plays at a reasonable speed for viewers) for you and will offer a far wider audience than showing the movie at your local cinema, even if you could afford to hire the place. Bear in mind that many charge you for showing your movies, but given the potential audiences, the costs are pretty reasonable, even at the top end in sites such as AtomShockwave.