Introduction to Short Films

The number of short films made and watched in this country is becoming increasingly more popular. Short films are often being exhibited at festivals not only here in the UK, but all over the world.

Short films have a lot more work to do in a shorter amount of time than in a normal feature film. A film shown at cinemas has approximately 90-100 minutes to give its audience a clear understanding of the plot, the characters, how the characters link with each other as well as a clear understanding of where each part of the narrative structure begins and ends in the film; a short film has to do all of this in approximately 5 minutes.

The narrative structure in any films contains a equilibrium at the beginning where everyone is living their normal lives with little expectation of what is to come, a disequilibrium where everyone in the film is more aware of a problem that will disrupt the way that the characters live their everyday lives and then finally at the end there is a second equilibrium where the big problem is solved and therefore the lives of the characters go back to normal. A feature film has the ability to expand this throughout the whole film and therefore can include much more content in each part; a short film has to be very quick and snappy when portraying each part of the film.

Although the structure is the same, there are a lot of differences between a short film and a long feature film that is seen in the cinemas. Short films are a way of getting the names of up and coming directors and writers into the film industry, so more often than not a short film has a rather low budget.

Short films are not very long, so the producers don’t have much time to introduce and delve into the lives of a lot of characters, so the number of main characters in a short film is a lot fewer than the amount that would be included in a feature film. The acting of this small number of characters wouldn’t necessarily be to the best quality either; this is due to the low budget used to create the money so they can’t spend loads of money buying the best actors and actresses.

Short films would generally also be filmed in only a small number of locations, sometimes only in one location. This would also be because of the low budget which would limit the amount of travelling that the film crew could do to get a lot of locations.

There would also be very basic camera angles and camera movement due to the low budget limiting them to the amount of technology they can get access to, which then automatically limits the amount of angles and movements they can do without it costing a lot of money.