Researching Short Films

 I've found through my research that typically when discussing the roles that occur within a film in an article or interview it is referring to feature length films. As our film has a time limit of 3-5 minutes, I felt it was important to research short films to build my understanding of what my group were creating. 

The Oscars define a short film as: 

A short film is defined as an original motion picture that has a running time of 40 minutes or less, including all credits.

The nominations for the 2021 Oscar shorts include; animation, documentary and live action. On average, the nominations run at a length of 19 minutes, which allow short is still considerably longer than our time limit.  Regardless, the idea of squashing down a narrative into a smaller time frame is still relevant. For me, this is the main struggle when it came to writing the script for our short film. 

On the website Screen Craft, nine tips were outlined to help filmmakers with short films. Some of these included:

• Be realistic about what you can achieve 
• Create a compelling cinematic experience 
• Take responsibility but don't dictate 

These tips affected how I wrote our script. Being realistic led me to think about our genre and how we could conform to the iconography on our lack of budget and experience. This led to my decision to focus on a more dystopian survival theme than Sci-Fi. 

I also spent time considering how to re-work the narrative to fit within the time limit. Typically, stories have a clear three-act structure, however, I felt this would be rushed and undeveloped if I tried to write it into our film. Instead, I created an integrated narrative switching between the perspectives of different characters. This gave a clear plot to the story whilst showing the audience more information in a short period of time.