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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68 COMMENTS
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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……..
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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
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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.
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Well said HenryK. Where can I see your web series?
I agree with the backlash. When AFM, Cannes, MIPCOM, and the like, have a web series market, then you might have some credibility. I can shoot a short in 2 to 3 days. A web series takes considerably longer. They are not a fair comparison. A short, music video, or similar are still viable. I can show 2 minutes of this type of work and I have credibility. A web series does not have that clout yet.
And audience viewership metrics mean nothing, Rebecca Black’s Friday video has 161 million views.
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Gabriel on 12.19.11 @ 12:45PM
Hey Mike Jones,
I see why you are making the argument, and I understand your points and I even see the strength in them but I disagree with the thought that a Webseries could replace a short film as a calling card. I’m not saying it isn’t possible, because there have been a few web series that have done well. I don’t know what the filmmaking culture is in Australia, but as someone that went to film school in LA and lives in Hollywood and works in the business, every single man, woman, child and actor that gets off a bus is shooting a web series in LA. Most are about a couple of roommates that live together and the hijinks they get up to when they run out of money. Or there is the every popular “The Office” meets: meter maids, airport security, gym workers…whatever. It feels like every single person is shooting a web series and yet there is no one I know that watches them with regularity, knows about them or has found a way to monetize them. I’ll also say that the vast majority are complete crap (which is true of short films as well). They are with bad acting, poor production value and just cheap knock offs of cheesy sitcoms.With all that said, let me say that the majority of young filmmakers getting from Talent Agencies, Management firms or production companies are still from their short films. Granted, it’s not always what obscure festival they were in but instead how many hits the website got. That is still what’s forwarded around amongst the industry. I will also say that most of the talent representation doesn’t give a shit what it is for the online market, if your short / feature / webseries has a lot of hits, then they are interested.
So i think rather than encouraging people to make one format or another, people should think about what stories they have to tell. To do a web series properly, you need to make many episodes. So let’s say you make 5 x 4 minute episodes. thats 20 minutes of content. So if you have $10K to make a 10 minute short or 20 minutes of a web series, which is going to look better?
Lastly, I would ask that Mike Jones points out his top 5 dramatic web series that aren’t’ funded by a large studio. So, THE GUILD is disqualified. He has advocated that dramatic web series are worth making, yet most research as well as pure viewership data has shown that VERY FEW people watch dramatic webisodes. They prefer to tune in for non-serialized episodic comedies where they can have a quick laugh, forward it if they like it and move on. If a young filmmaker has a short story they want to tell that’s dramatic, do not turn it into a web series because you think more people will watch it. Don’t cheapen your vision and extend your idea and simply have 3 guys with Canon 5Ds’ running around trying to make too many webisodes.
This film just went viral and got attention in Hollywood:
http://vimeo.com/32397612
as did this:
http://www.arev.ca/
This went viral a bit over a year ago , the director got signed and now they are making the feature version of it:
http://vimeo.com/11099712anyway, there is more evidence that the short film is not dead. Please, if anyone has examples of Web Series that have launched directors, or that are getting crazy hits, please start them.
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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.
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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.
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Nice post, Koo. Happy to see you’ve got in on the site- thoughtful, provocative.
Thanks also for stepping in and adding some light to eh growing dark setting in on the commentary.
Egad.
-M-
BTW, Thanks for posting this as a guest post- great idea, and I for one am looking for more. Cheers, M.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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i have panic attacks and my doctor reccomends relaxation exercise”;~
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I found this post interesting because regardless if the short film is dead, or no longer useful or whatever, I believe quite strongly that the “mini-feature” is a new format that will in-fact become “very” popular in the coming years. This would be a feature length story told in roughly 60 minutes -or- told in two 60s minutes chunks. The reason I believe in this stems from the the rapidly changing way people will consume movies and video content. When a good chunk of the audience begins watching on say, tablets (iPad) for example, the min-feature just makes perfect sense. All it needs is some good marketing behind it. I think it’s inevitable, actually and has real potential as an attractive new format. Additionally, you want to talk about how Short Films are outdated… Film Schools in general on a mass scale are failing to keep their students up to date on the real trends taking place in what is now becoming and will soon be a very volatile and changing industry. 10 years from now the motion picture landscape will not look as it does now. All kinds of new businesses will and already are emerging that have “coped a clue” on what’s really going on out there and many of these new motion picture businesses will have nothing to do with the Big 6 Studios in Hollywood. I wonder how many film schools are telling this to their students?
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Mike,
Don’t listen to these folks slamming you. Your post inspired me. I’m sure everyone has opposing stories to backup their views, but film – like many creative fields – lacks one single best way to “make it” to use a phrase from music.
I have been coming to the same conclusions as you as I watch what is happening out there, and there is a big difference between getting a short optioned and launching a sustainable career as a filmmaker.
The web series will appeal to those who:
1) Don’t want to play the studio games and wouldn’t know where to start.
2) Want to run and control their own business.
3) Don’t have quite enough money or fame to pull off $25,000 indie films (Ed Burns)
4) Want to have regular, direct relationships with their audience.
5) Do not see the odds of being the next District 9 in their favor.
With the Internet converging soon with TV, popularly voted web series will show up right next to LOST and 24 level shows. Staying power and audience power will count more than that movie a few years back that did OK.
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Frants Combrink on 12.29.10 @ 7:35AM
I think the short film has a definite place. I am of the opinion that the short film is a showcase of potential capabilities, not so much of expanding on the short film into a full feature movie or tv series. I’m working on a short film that will be only that, a short film. It will hopefully show my capabilities of telling a story by means of finding base with the character, feeling the story, seeing growth, and finally, carrying a message to the audience. As artists we should…IMO…tell stories that either ask questions about our current situation (be it political, social, those little things that are actually just funny but we take it way to serious, or just some life wisdom) with the use of stories. Just a thought, my opinion for what it is worth. Thanks Mike, I did not know about the web-series option. Might investigate it at a later stage.
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Frants Combrink on 12.29.10 @ 8:06AM
Oh and the short film is a great way of saying things in a different way. Highlighting aspects of life in a different way. Like another said here, some things just can’t be said any better in 180minutes as in 5 to 10 minutes.
Short films..yes another thing I just thought about…short films is a way of true artistic expression. It allows those who love story telling a means to tell those stories…as oppose to those who want to be Spielberg or Blomkamp.
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filmmaker on 01.13.11 @ 7:04PM
mike jones you know what they say, those who do, do. those who can’t, teach – and in your case, write waffle like this. as for ‘personal attacks’, it’s jones who excels at thinly veiled ranting about his own students, i’m sure if they actually read this stuff they would find his assertions quite negative and hypocritical. if you position yourself as intentionally provocative, you should wear the consequences. the day you make a film worth more than 10 seconds of my time, you can start criticising
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Sarah Levinson on 02.1.11 @ 2:27PM
Mike lectures at an institution, AFTRS, the premier media production training school in Australia. They are offering short courses on Webisode production. This is an expensive ‘film school’ education exercise, which is ironic for this blog site called ‘nofilmschool’. If Mike’s article is an attempt to generate marketing publicity for the course, then his writing is a massive fail. LMAO.
I hope the standard for the institution is higher than what is revealed in Mike’s misguided argument. If people criticize him for his boastful, bloated and arrogant attitude, then he has only brought it on upon himself. I wonder if he calls himself an academic. I hope his ideas, and his statements are not a reflection on AFTRS, because if it does, then it is shameful and disgraceful. We all look forward to short films created by Mike Jones, or maybe not.
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david hoyle on 03.25.11 @ 8:30AM
A good piece. The vitriol of the comments it provoked suggests that it is right and timely to discuss this. It excites the innate conservatism of creative people, and must be good for that reason alone. More still could be said on the common introversion of the short, and their tendency to the solpicistic. It may be unfair to expect most 18- to 21-years olds to have much to say about the world, yet its does seem slightly wasteful to encourage them to use one of the most powerful media ever developed to produce, and aspire to produce, just short fictions. There are serious limitations – as is well argues here – to the short as both teaching tool and exemplar: but a more serious reservation seems to me to arise from its confirmation that our new media practitioners should aim for nothing beyond fiction. Film, and TV more so, can do so much more than that.
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Vincent Galiano on 08.25.11 @ 2:47AM
NOT a good article. He’s only talking about advertising and audience. That’s stupid, a filmmaker shouldn’t think of it. A real filmmaker should be an artist, not a seller.
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Over here you have shared about the film making course and the information about the institutes. According to me this article has many points which are very helpful for us to know more about the film making courses and career.
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adambein on 11.8.11 @ 2:56PM
Thx for writing & posting this, ‘helps me alot. Thx for the comments/responses everyone. Lotsa food for thought.
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Sadash on 11.16.11 @ 10:19PM
I think Mike is right. Most short films cannot reflect the elements needed to make a feature. Sustaining charaterisations, structure over 90min. or more is quite a different pie.One cannot learn these by making only short films. You need to make feature films to be a feature film maker. I use shorts as means of exploration of themes and ideas.Not for festivals or showcasing in a formal manner. Eventually some of these explorations feed into my feature film stories and screenplays.
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I happen to be in agreement mostly here with Mike’s article. I started with a short film but my intention was to do my web series which of course came next (Day Zero the series). My pilot (here: http://blip.tv/dayzerotv/day-zero-episode-101-lethal-pilot-blipnew-5624752) is 23 minutes long, which sets the course of our episodes, of which we have 10 for season 1, so it’ll clock in at around 220+ hours total (bang for your buck!). We’re drama and sci-fi, giving us an edge, so character development is important to us, that’s why it fits the half hour TV slot unlike most web series. But I started it because of the sustaining factor, as we get a lot more experience than one short :)
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Sadash on 12.14.11 @ 4:39PM
Hi I come back to this site once again because it makes me think outside the box. There is a whole idea that just by making shorts, or even just shooting any kind of films, a filmmaker will become a regular feature film maker. I don’t think that happens usually. Short films as a form are not really the gate way to making long features. Whats more self funding can only work so much. At the end of day what is required is to learn to negotiate financial matters for a project. Whether its a short or feature or even a documentary, a filmmaker should try to involve more partners both for creative, financial support and ultimately distribution. Thats the crux of becoming a filmmaker making films which will be screened and distributed. The more one learns to cooperate, the more it becomes possibile to make bigger and bigger projects.
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Adele on 01.21.12 @ 7:12PM
I was not going to waste my time commenting on this article, but it made me so angry that I could not leave without putting in my two cents. First of all I am a FIRM believer in short film making! The short film is alive and well. There are many companies online including Ouat Media that specialize in the distribution of short film. You could say that the short film is a separate form of artistic expression all to itself, just as theater is different than film. There is no reason to put down the short film! I believe that the standard method of feature film and TV production is riddled with inefficiency and wastes time and money. Notice that the author of this blog has not listed any feature films or television shows that he has directed or produced. So I think what we have here is someone who just writes and thinks and has little to no experience in the actual field of film production or distribution. He is probably too busy playing video games to produce any films himself! In short this blog is a list of personal opinions which may or may not have real world relevance. I am sure the web series has many possibilities, but the traditional ways of making films are antiquated and with all the new technology the entire way films are made will be changing. So this author would spend his time better actually MAKING MOVIES instead of just making up unfounded and arrogant opinions if the film industry!
7 pingbacks
http://www.slashfilm.com/2010/07/16/sci-fi-short-the-raven-lands-at-universal-feature-version-may-star-mark-wahlberg/
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.