The Short Film is Dead: Time for the Emerging Filmmaker to Get a New Calling Card
This is a guest post by Mike Jones, Lecturer in Screen Studies at the Australian Film Television and Radio School.
Filmmaking is full of traditions. These traditions are the “way things are done,” they are what is “expected,” they are “industry standard,” they are “default” and “accepted.” This is all fine and dandy until we recognise the innate implication of such Traditions is to imply Right and Wrong – that there is a correct way to do things and deviations are “incorrect,” not “acceptable” or, worse still, not “professional.”
These traditions manifest themselves in all manner of guises – creative, technical, business, logistic. I have written previously about how the tools of filmmaking (particularly software) possess internal philosophies that enforce traditions – traditions which may or may not be a good fit for your own creative processes. In a similar light, there occurs to me to be another long-standing and entrenched tradition (one that may not be serving emerging and indie filmmakers as it should) that needs to be questioned. That is the significance of the Short Film.
There are two ways of looking at how a Short Film serves the emerging and aspiring filmmaker. The first is as a Learning Exercise, the second is as a Calling Card. The short film seeks to be a learning experience by providing a paradigm for engagement in film production within viable financial and resource constrains. Simply put, the short film allows you to gain experience without the overhead. Similarly, as a calling card the short film aims to serve as a demonstration of the filmmaker’s abilities. It has the express purpose of convincing financiers and funding bodies of the filmmaker’s worthiness of trust to make a longer project. The theory is that a good short film is a large flag to wave in the air saying “this is what I can do in 10 minutes of screen time and no money, just imagine what I could do with 100 minutes and a ton of cash!”
Learning Experience and Calling Card. This is what short films are for…. and at the start of the second decade of the 21st century, the short film fails pretty dismally at both.
Learning Experience
The short film fails as a Learning Exercise because making a short film only really teaches you about making short films. The relevance of short film structures, patterns and conventions to feature and long-form drama are tenuous at best. A perusal of the award winning shorts from major festivals around the world in any given recent year will prove this point. Interesting, poetic, introspective, technically accomplished they may all be, but their connection aesthetically or narratively to longer forms is decidedly absent. And this is only right and proper. A good short Should Not be simply a feature film shoved into a small space. That’s a recipe for disaster. Slice-of-life, the punch-line joke and the microcosm observation are perfectly fitting structures for short films but they almost never work viably outside of the short-film format.
Whilst you personally may gain experience working with a crew, cast and technology, you wont be exercising, testing or tangibly expanding your understanding of those elements of story, character, theme, myth and metaphor that the short film – simply by its duration – does not wholly embody. Moreover, since there is no effective business model for short films – no audience and no market outside of self-indulgent short-film festivals populated almost entirely of other aspiring filmmakers – making a short film crucially doesn’t teach you about Audiences. Your short won’t prompt you to ask who your audience is, what they expect, what they want, how they engage, what excites and challenges them, how they will respond, what feeling-states they are seeking?
The deeper irony is that film schools the world over make short films as the fundamental learning experience and yet spend near 100% of their class time discussing and analysing Feature films. This approach seems to me much like going to culinary school, studying week after week how to make 3-course fine dining and then having to make a sandwich as a final project. A great sandwich is no doubt a work of art but it really proves nothing about competence in 3-course gastronomy.
I should point out here, for the record, that a large part of my own career is based in film schools and universities. I am, above all else, a teacher and I believe passionately in what Film School offers. If I want to build bridges I have to study bridge building. If I want to build films I have study cinema. Film School is a powerful means to do that.
BUT…. And there are two Big BUTS…. First, not all film schools are “good” and second is that to become “good” film schools need to be consistently and persistently challenged to evolve and adapt and live up to noble intention. So here I challenge the short film paradigm film school is predicated upon as a learning experience.1
There is an assumption I’m making with this argument against the viability and usefulness of the short film as a learning tool that should be pointed out. The assumption is that the intention of a short is to learn about, and prove competence in, making other longer forms of cinema (TV drama and features). It’s possible this isn’t the case for everyone. There may be limited opportunity for a financial career in it but you may be very happy making short films as a primary mode of artistic expression. Or else we may look to advertising which certainly thrives on short-form narrative. But if you dared to show your 10 minute dramatic short to an advertising company they’d laugh you out of the room – tell your story in 26 seconds or forget about it, mate! So here again, even in the microcosm of advertising, making short narrative films really doesn’t help you learn what you need to know.
Calling Card
This brings us to the other side of the coin; the short film as career Calling Card.
No matter how cool your short film is, it will largely fail to serve you if your intention is to make bigger, longer dramatic works. Short films fail because they do not demonstrate the crucial things that fill financiers with confidence. A short film, regardless of how “good” it is, can’t effectively demonstrate you can sustain character arcs and it doesn’t show you understand narrative structure. A short film doesn’t prove you know how to develop story over time or construct consistent dramatic tension and release. A short film doesn’t demonstrate you understand audiences and genre and know how to attract an audience. Without these things there is no real evidence you could effectively make an viable feature or long-form drama.
Since the birth of modern film-schools (and the self-taught DIY culture of indie filmmakers that grew up very much in parallel to them) the traditional established, accepted and entrenched process for emerging filmmakers was to make a Short as a calling card to validate your abilities to make a Feature or TV drama. It worked. For many years it worked. But its viability is wearing off. In 2010 the viable currency of the short film is dying. Either as Learning Experience or Calling Card the Short Film fails to satisfy.
Of course, this begs the question… Is there something better?
What’s an indie filmmaker to do? Lacking, as they do, time and resources to make a feature or a TV pilot? The answer is, and should be, staring us all in the face – the Web series.
Web Series
I would contest that the emerging filmmaker learning experience and calling card of the future (if not the now) is the Webisodic Drama. Where producers, financiers, funding bodies may currently ask to see your short and what festivals it’s been in, they will soon (and already are) asking “Where’s your webseries site and how much traffic do you get?”
The advantages of the web series as both Learning Tool and Calling Card for emerging filmmakers are myriad and obvious.
- The web series is resource-viable. It arguably takes no more money, technology or logistics to make an episodic online series than it does to make a short film.
- The web series can freely and easilly find a far larger international audience than a short film on the festival circuit ever could. In doing so the web series both teaches and proves audience engagement and the ability of the filmmaker to create for, gather, keep and motivate viewers.
- The web series can viably demonstrate the filmmmaker understands Character Arc and Story Structure. Whilst webisodes are generally short, the nature of their construct, spacing and structure connects very well to both feature film narrative turning points and long-form drama act-breaks, episodes and seasons. The web series may be small scale but the core structure is tangibly applicable and demonstrable, unlike most short films which (like a sandwich to a 3 course dinner) offer little direct overlap.
- The web series is innately a 360 approach where social-media and online ecologies are part and parcel of what a web series is. Where short and feature film projects the world over are being asked to add-on 360 elements (websites, trailers, games etc), the web series is integrated tightly to this model from the get-go.
Whether you are a film school student trying to work out what to make as a major project or a DIY indie looking for a project to launch yourself, the objectives are the same – to learn by experience and to build for yourself a kind of cinematic Proof of Age Card. It’s here that I feel eternally frustrated seeing talented aspiring filmmakers pouring huge amounts of effort and resources into glossy, story-less, low-stakes, short films with theatrical prints for self-indulgent film festivals that nobody watches. As with many long-entrenched elements of filmmaking, the tradition of the short film needs to be let go of and seen as the antiquated anomaly it is; a tool of a bygone era. A good short film can be great work of art but emerging and aspiring filmmakers need much more than a short work of art to build a career. The short-format, online, episodic webseries is the most dynamic, audience-driven, self-publicising, learning vehicle indie filmmakers (in film school or not) have ever had access to.
I suspect I’m preaching to the converted in this forum, or perhaps helping push forward those who were sitting the fence with niggling doubts, but my bigger objective is to change the culture of film schools. I look forward to the day when at the end of a semester major film schools across the world are pushing the go-live button on dynamic, dramatic, narrative structured, engaging, audience driven, genre inspired, socially networked, episodic cliff-hanging drama series… Rather than sending a collection of tapes and film-reels off in the mail to festivals no one will see or care about.
Time to forge a new tradition and file the old short-film one in the attic.
Mike Jones (@mikejonesnet) has diverse backgrounds in screen production, post-production and writing. Along with serving as script editor and screenwriter he has penned more than 200 essays, articles, and reviews on the screen-media industries along with three books for students of screen media. When he’s not teaching or writing about cinema he is playing computer games and is Lecturer in Screen Studies at the Australian Film TV and Radio School.
Creative Commons-licensed images from flickr users work the angles, ventana, and pinprick, respectively.
- If you want to read more on my thoughts on film school you may want to check out some of the articles I have written on this topic: Leading or Following – Reconsidering Film School, Holistic Thinking – Integrated Making: a manifesto, Filmschool Technology, and Film education and the culture of editors. [↩]
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45 COMMENTS
This is really a perspective from someone who writes ESSAYS. It’s apparent that you don’t realize that film schools which teach writing for film usually incorporate ALL FORMATS. A snob can’t give a real perspective until that snob has been through the wringer of film school and the projects that have to be done in order to hone craft. I agree with the guy above me, this is bullsh*t. If you don’t walk the walk…..
Those who actually do things, also work in the field, one which you don’t clearly understand. I see this is just another blog.
I hope people can see Mike’s post as a deliberately provocative attempt to get people thinking about alternatives to short films, instead of as an absolute statement that no one should ever make a short film ever again.
Henry, great point about shorts frequently being adapted into features these days. But when you bring up “assuming you’d like to make a living making movies,” that got me thinking. The short film has never really had a business model other than to get made into a feature. Certain auteurs like Don Hertzfeldt have made a living doing it, yes, but they are the exception rather than the rule.
I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with hoping to make a short into a feature, but that’s kind of like launching a dot-com startup with the hopes of one day getting acquired by Google or Microsoft. Does it happen? Yes. Do a lot of people fail because their business model relies on eventual acquisition/funding by someone else? Definitely.
A web series to me (or at least the promise of the web series — whether or not it’s actually been happening to date is another matter) should offer more self-sustainable options than a short film, wherein building an audience online could help you “make a living making movies,” as it were. It could be ad-supported, it could be brand-integrated, it could be a paid subscription, it could be “freemium”… many of these options weren’t very mature when we released our web series in 2007, but I think what Mike is getting at is there are a lot of possibilities for web series that aren’t being fully exploited by filmmakers.
- Donna on 07.21.10 @ 7:46AM
> You don’t knock people for doing one thing to support something else. There’s room for it all. His style of writing is meant to sound like his word is the only word worth listening to. Instead of being against something, try being FOR whatever it is you like to do. I thought it was only Americans that lacked tact, Australians do too.
- HenryK on 08.4.10 @ 7:31PM
> Partially agree, but I also think it was a bit too ‘this is the word’ type of writing. Also, it just drives me crazy that so much of the discussion on blogs like this and especially on fest, tech, and indie blogs completely ignores the great work that’s actually doing its job getting people careers. It’s like a dirty secret… ignore those amazing shorts, you can never make something like that. Uhhh, no, those are actually providing a road map to success. When a door opens (and shorts have always been a way in, my closest friend wrote and starred in a short that launched the director’s career and was the main event in that book Short Films 101), the smart ones notice and try to get their foot in by rising to the occasion.
As far as web series, I did go do a web series and it’s also a highly viable option but the production quality has to be very high. Mine was science fiction, I only got two episodes done and then I pitched it around as a feature length screenplay and the series itself was optioned and is in development for t.v. So heck yeah, I agree about web series, but they’re not the only way in… it’s features that, to me anyway, are nearly dead because either nobody is making great genre indies (comedy, sci-fi, horror), or the festivals are just ignoring them in favor of the usual ‘twee’ indie cinema.
- Errol on 07.21.10 @ 1:54AM
Australia has angry film wannabees who can’t take the fact that others are doing actual movies. Now we know what happens to those who fail at actually making films, they become essayists! Keep your Kangaroos, Cap’n. The only thing that’s dead is your blog, if you can even call this that being substandard viewpoint from an embittered, failed film person. There is no value in what he is saying as it is like demanding you should be able to drive without ever having driven a car. Film studies people are such bitter wanks. lol. He critiques as if he knows what he’s saying and yet it all boils down to HE HAS NOT DONE ANYTHING to enable him to speak as an erudite on the subject. Essays? roflmbao
- Donna on 07.21.10 @ 7:43AM
One example of how this guy is just off. This blogger seems to not know much about films. Couch potatoes say no to film schools? Funny. Actually, no….. irrelevant.
- Salvatore on 07.21.10 @ 12:38PM
Australians are rude and nasty types who don’t know anything about the industry maybe cause they are too busy being drunk and fucking. Film Studies majors are usually the BITCHY and BITTER kids who just TALK. You can always tell production types because they are the ones who actually DO it. Loser article from a loser guy with loser career. If Rex Reed had donated sperm, this blogger would have emerged……..
I gotta say Im stunned at how the first page of comments on this article are wonderfully thoughtful, considered, articulate and idea-laden posts both for and against the premise…. and then you get the second page of comments and everything slides into a strange diatribe of vitriol. Im not sure what happened between page 1 and page 2…?
For the record ive been a professional editor and filmmaker for 15 years (in both the US and Australia). I’d like to think my thoughts are little more grounded than the ‘wannabe film studies major’ I seem to have been taken for on Comment Page 2.
But, that said, the internet is what the internet is and its anonymity brings out the worst of of our comment-trolling nature.
I hope that most readers take the post in the spirit it is intended – a debate kick-starter that questions the established pattern, asks if there might be something better, and puts forward a case as to why the webseries might be both a better calling-card and learning tool. Agree or disagree, argue your case but dont waste keystrokes on troll-behaviour and flaming. Its just a waste of everyone’s oxygen.
Mike
- HenryK on 08.4.10 @ 7:48PM
>Seeing as how my post kicks off page 2 of the comments, I’d like to see a rebuttal of anything that I bring up. I feel that I made my arguments in a clear and concise way. And honestly, it’s disingenuous of you to expect anything less than some agitation when you throw down the gauntlet at a time when short films are doing better than ever. The tone of the article incited this type of rebuttal… and I think it speaks to a growing frustration among those who feel they’re being lied to within the indie, festival, and tech community. It feels like a ‘cool’ kids hipster filmmaker club where the quality of the filmmaking doesn’t even matter. There’s a great deal of cognitive dissonance that’s become nauseating.
Besides this, I’m probably one of the very, very few people who made a web series for less than $500 that actually is going somewhere. And guess what… I shopped around FINISHED WEBISODES WITH THOUSANDS OF HITS to every company funding web series ventures and was rejected by every single one, including koldcast… KOLDCAST.tv! I did my web series with no marketing, no publicity, no write-ups, I just poured everything into making it entertaining and made it work for the youtube medium, leveraging the daily searches of ghosts, ufos, aliens, etc. so that if it was good enough, it’d eventually rise to the top in those searches. Getting back to those web series production companies and studios, they exhibit the same total inability to recognize what’s entertaining and well made as festivals do. As soon as I said screw the small potatoes with no vision, wrote a script around the same character, and pitched it around, it wasn’t one week before it got picked up to develop as a television show. So I know from whence I speak… but I’m still doing a short because I need to show what I can do, take it to the next level and, hopefully, gain some leverage in the web series deal.
I don’t know what else to say except the one thing that should be encouraged is to TAKE YOUR TIME WITH YOUR SCRIPT AND YOUR ACTORS… ask yourself what’s interesting or entertaining about every single moment in your project. Don’t fall for your own pretty images, your own witticisms, or your own shortcomings… and make sure you gauge who you’re taking advice from… many times, they don’t really know any better and have never demonstrated otherwise. Challenge yourself to rise to the level of your heros and if you succeed, you WILL be noticed.
- Kelly on 07.24.10 @ 4:43AM
Aussies are racist and loud like Mel Gibson. All they seem to do is bitch and moan and make themselves look all puffy chested. There is nothing thoughtful about people who trash others for their own gain, but you seem to think you are brilliant here. I’m amused that a short led to a major studio pick up, can’t see how your brilliant mind missed that. If you had to speak about your ideas, keep it about your ideas and not about slanting an industry. This is not even healthy debate. It’s stepping on others who bothered to pick up the camera and do the things you seem scared to do yourself. Speaking on film, yet you are nothing but words. This article is not thought out well. The whole website, well, blog, is slanted by virtue of it’s name and angle of approach, typical of Aussies who bitch about everything cause they swear they are the coolest when there’s nothing really there. You’re down under alright.
Alright guys,
There are plenty of ways you can disagree with Mike’s post without getting into personal attacks, flaming, trolling, or whatever you want to call it. Insulting someone with “Australians are ____” generalizations doesn’t exactly lend your own opinion much credence. Especially when you’re attacking someone anonymously, without leaving your own last name or web site…
Furthermore, this is not Mike’s web site. I’m running it from New York, not Australia. Sorry if you failed to realize that.
I think short films do have a place creatively… a one-off production will always be a way to show sides of a character that just don’t fit within a movie or a series.
But effort vs payoff I would agree that the short film is dead.
Most of the time a short film can’t be expanded into a good film, once the short is done it’s enough to whet appetites but not enough to satisfy, and all the work that goes into promoting it would go further if there were a bunch of related shorts.
You could still make one of a series of web shorts more cinematic and visually intensive and submit it to festivals and then it would satisfy that itch and also promote the web series.
Nope. I can’t imagine a web series competing with a well made short film. Yes, those name actors are coming onboard, but they want to be seen and work is scarce. They aren’t in it for the vision that a director has about a cable quality indie episodic on YouTube. Wrapping up an idea, getting to the climax, all in 10 to 40 minutes is still moviemaking. And you can blow your technical wad on one project, rather than linger through several “episodes”, meaning the best of your auteuristic chops in one story. If webisodes are being seen, it’s the internet itself, not the webisode. Frankly, I’ve seen alot of crap webisodes, meaning it’s cheap, easy and anyone with a vidcam can pick up and start casting their friends for some great idea they had while they were stoned. Now, that happens in shorts, too, but there are short filmakers out there that pull it off with film, which no webisode can compete against. Webisodes = poor man’s TV.
agree with Mike almost 100%, as a working filmmaker/lecturer with an award winning feature and career as a writer, that the majority of shorts made by student filmmakers (I’ve watched thousands as a festival programmer) are down right awful calling cards. Yes there are exceptions like the few that get OPTIONED for a studio film and even fewer that get made (District 9 again). The European film financing model does encourage shorts to features from students of Euro and developing countries often very successfully…. but really guys how much easier and more fun to crash bang into a low to micro budget feature that should take you 12 days to shoot…. half the time I know of students of mine who have shot a 10 minutes film then sit in what would be development hell years after said short has been made?
4 pingbacks
- Time for the Emerging Filmmaker to Get a New Calling Card on 07.12.10 @ 8:53PM
- Short Film is Dead? Long Live the Short Film! on 07.15.10 @ 9:43AM
- Tips for Building Buzz for a Web Series - NoFilmSchool on 07.18.10 @ 3:09PM
- The short film is dead. Long live the short film. « POV on 08.19.10 @ 8:44AM
This is so off the mark, it’s ridiculous… if anything, indie features are totally dead. The reason is that festivals cater almost exclusively now to filmmakers who are somehow connected to the festival… or filmmakers who can afford a publicist. The films are hardly ever suitable for a wider audience anymore and so the distribution, sponsorship, and an audience outside of other filmmakers has totally dried up. Like I said on the blog that linked to this article, when is the last time an indie feature reached a wide audience? Primer? That was SIX YEARS AGO… this entire digital revolution later (the HVX200 was released around 2005 if I’m not mistaken) and we don’t have any good NARRATIVE indie features to show for it. None on the level of the stuff shot on film prior to the digital revolution… nothing on the level of Following, Pi, Primer, Clerks… maybe Blair Witch with Paranormal Activity, but even that was rejected by most festivals. It took HOLLYWOOD to know that ‘Hey, this could actually be ENTERTAINING to an audience.” Festivals can’t figure it out anymore unless they’re told. The major issue is that if you make something as good as ‘The Godfather’, if you don’t have the connections or a publicist, it now has a fat chance of getting into a festival. Either that or there simply aren’t any good indies being made anymore, it’s hard to figure it out without access to those thousands of rejected films.
MEANWHILE, you write this article at a time when NOW, MORE THAN EVER, STUDIOS… STUDIOS! are buying up short film rights to make or develop features out of them. What’s crazy isn’t that short films are no longer calling cards, but they’re now serving the purpose of calling card AND your first script. As a matter of fact, I think the same day you put this article up, Mark Wahlberg bought up the rights to the internet phenom short film ‘The Raven’. Prior to that Raimi bought up ‘Panic Attack’. Del Toro is developing something from A THREE MINUTE FILM called ‘Mama’. The thing they all have in common is they demonstrate that the filmmaker can achieve the look and feel of a multimillion dollar film or something you’d see at the local cinema, they’re entertaining (and proven, through their online popularity). The thing I think when I watch any of these, or the shorts of Neill Blomkamp is that if I had a billion dollars, I’d give these people a few million to make a film. The fact that you can run the marathon of shooting a feature means absolutely nothing unless it’s good. And the difference between a career-launching short and a career-launching feature film is that a career-launching short is now much easier to get out there… you don’t even need festivals… just an internet connection. With a feature, it’s ok if it’s black-and-white (Following), grainy (Pi, Clerks), or shot on video (pick one) as long as there’s a great story there… and 99.9% of the time (actually 100%) they should be comedy, horror, or science fiction… but with a short, not only does it need to be genre, it needs to look and feel like it was shot for about 1,000 times the budget. Hate to say it, but ’slick’ is the word… this is all assuming you’d like to make a living making movies.
And to say that shorts cannot translate to features? Short films and short stories that feature some nugget of an idea or concept that warrants further exploration are often much easier to successfully translate into a feature film than is a novel or some longer form content. Again, you say this during a time when we have probably one of the greatest examples of a short becoming a feature ever – ‘Alive in Jo’burg became ‘District 9′. Just to cite another example, ‘Coffee and Cigarettes became P.T. Anderson’s ‘Sydney’ (aka ‘Hard Eight’.)
What’s funny is that this article was posted at a time when we have Variety and Hollywood Reporter articles proclaiming that Hollywood has ’shorts’ fever. I hate to say it, but it points to the growing disconnect between the realities of the business versus the indie world. Of course, indie hipsters will say, “That’s a good thing, we wear our rebellion on our sleeve…” B.S. That’s a cop-out for not committing to learning the craft of storytelling and directing actors. “Inception” just came out… from a guy who first made a grainy, black-and-white film for $8,000 that was perfectly written, acted, and directed. Show me more of these types of films coming from the currently tech (not just the cameras, COUGH-red, but the distribution technology? who gives a crap!) and navel obsessed indie world and I’ll believe making an expertly crafted genre short film is now a dead end towards getting a career.