Post 6 - What makes a good short film?

To begin our knowledge on short films our school organised a speaker to attend a triple lesson with us. Rebecca Knapp, who is involved with the film making industry, showed us a variety of short films that she worked with. Becky is a film produer and works with various script writters and came with tips and advice for us..

Becky defined the different varieties of short films with their separate timings. With the length of a short film being under 5 minutes, producers could only really focus on a jokey plot with your average stereotypical characters. With this in mind films that lasted between 5 and 12 minutes would have more of a plot, more unique yet still simple characters but a journey of events. Short films enable producers to present their ability to the media industry in hope their carer will proceed from there. With films lasting between 12 and 30 minutes they would have a secondary story line with more developed characters with multiple character traits.

During Becky’s visit she left us with bundles of information and most importantly a variety of scripts we can look at. The script I mainly focused on was “Does God play football?” I enjoyed reading through this script and found it benefited my learning due to already having watched the short film. With this in mind it helped me to develop my idea as well as get a good insight on how scripts should be set out.  

Within making short films, it is clear that the target audience is very narrow. It is important that I keep this in mind when producing my short film, by doing so I will ensure that the films genre isn’t too specific and instead is rather general so it will appear to a variety of audiences. When making a short film, it is important for producers to impress people such as Becky Knapp as ultimately they could fund the productions distribution. It is clear that people make shorts to get into the film industry and with this in mind competition of talent occurring in them is dramatically increasing.

When producing a short film it is clear that the writing and idea development part of any film is likely to be one of the more challenging areas for film makers. With this in mind when writing a script it is important to have previously approached the idea generation and writing stage of your short film. Many critics have analysed a variety of scripts and pre-production work and have said that the most frequent problem is that all producers want to include too much information for their short films.

The image to the left is a brain storm of information of elements that are important when not only writing a script for our short films, but also the remainder of the production work. The information indicated is from the sheets given to us from director/producer Becky Knapp, information on Becky is previously located on post 5, as well as independant study.

The attachment below links directly to the screen writing conventions website, looking at this website will be important as well a helpful when writing scripts for our production in the later part of the year.

scriptfactory.

For my independent study work, we were asked to complete 5 tasks of our own choice. My first piece of work was based upon the short film, previously analysed, “Plastic Bag” by Ramin Bahrani. The film follows the journey of the plastic bag, which encounters every obstacle along the way. The narrative is that of the plastic bag and in the end the wayward plastic bag wafts its way to the ocean. I enjoyed this short film, but it did leave me very confused. Personally I prefer a human narrative, because as an audience it is easier to relate to the story line.

My second bit of research was based around the short film “Mister Green”, this is a parable about change; both personal and political. The story line of this film makes you think a lot, and can have a huge impact on the audiences emotions. This is very common for short films; they do have a tendency to touch each viewer individually.

Thirdly I watched “The other side” by Amyn Kaderall. After researching what inspired Amyn Kaderall to produce the short film I came across the factors that she was inspired by the current immigration debate in the US. The film seeks to provoke American audiences into considering a different perspective. The film itself was produced by MMX Independent Television Service (ITV’s) and had a noticeably small cast, due to research it is also apart that it did appear to have a significantly small crew also.

For my penultimate piece of independent study I explored in depth more about shorts themselves. Throughout my research I was directly linked towards study on the UK Film Council. Within this study I came across an interesting quote, which summarised the purpose of short films: “Short films can help new film makers to develop their talent”. The UK film council was abolished due to a change of government, but before hand they funded script development, short films, film production, film export and distribution as well as cinemas. Before the abolishing took place there were a variety of arguments against the film council which complained about “miss using public money”. The council itself was set up in 2000 by the labour government as a non-departmental public body to develop and promote the film industry in the UK. When producing media texts, it appeared that the film council was beneficial and extremely helpful and personally I can not see the reasoning behind it being abolished.

My final study was based upon film director Stephen Mead. Mead is a director of short films and started his career designing at the theatre Royal Stratford East. It is notable that his real passion was however for film and photography. After working as a film editor and being so successful he was soon promoted to a director.  His works include “Little Birds”, “Wick” and “Waterfall”. Stephen is also seen to work intimately with business partner Holly Hartley in the production of his shorts.