Discussion about writing short scripts

[mattias]

you haven't told your boy mattias to chill

*lol* he dares not. Seriously i'm calm, and the so called name calling was not meant as such. That's what i meant by not taking it personal. You're not telling us who you are so we're forced to to use prejudice. So, are you a begginer or seasoned pro? The answer will help up address you better and more politely in the future. /matt

[Evan Kubota]

I also find them occasionally on DVDs like "Tsotsi" has a 20 minute short made on 35mm in the "extras".

I wish there was a website that listed what shorts are available as extras on DVDs. The Criterion 'Noz w wodzie' release comes with a second disc of Polanski shorts that's like a gold-mine as far as seeing that sort of thing - although a lot of his stuff is highly visual and fairly experimental. Not really character-driven.

I basically bought the Criterion Truffaut set to see 'Les Mistons,' which I still haven't gotten around to.

Obviously the narrative short form had its peak in terms of 'legitimacy' in the '60s and '70s in Europe when they would sometimes screen before features and were considered a legitimate, lower-cost way for a new director to get some experience. I've watched both of the 'short film collections' that air on IFC so much that they are worn out. There's some decent stuff there but a lot of it is far from what I hope for the form.

I also had the chance to look at some rejected festival submissions... that was informative.

[Evan Kubota]

http://www.worldaccordingtoshorts.com/

This is showing at my local independent theatre. I'll check it out today or tomorrow... interested in seeing some (hopefully) good examples of the form.

[steve hyde]

I also find them occasionally on DVDs like "Tsotsi" has a 20 minute short made on 35mm in the "extras".

I wish there was a website that listed what shorts are available as extras on DVDs.

...wish no more:

http://shortformfilms.blogspot.com/

join the blog and let's start cataloging them.

Steve

[mik]

i think intuition and instinct are not magic, and are based on knowlege. more you know more you can use / brake / invent. i like the comparison to architecture, cause its also structural thing. and like in these profession when you don't know the rules of the game, you just cant do anything, whatever it would be - house on suburbs from catalogue or buckminster fuller "cosmic" ideas. i've read two books about screenwriting and i think they were really helpful in my try to write 2 minute film (i am beginner).

[CHAS]

Hi Even

Good point about where to find short films, it's a problem. I wonder why there aren't more collections of short films published. Maybe there are more than I know about but they are just hard to find.

But other than once a year events like these, it's hard to expose yourself to a lot of shorts. How do other people find shorts?

Keagan

ha ha -- pretty funny....A few years ago I went to every short film fest I could find...when I realized that 80-90% of the films I saw sucked shit I decided to start making my own...It's sad that the short films have, as another poster wrote, such a lack of legitimacy. I guess that is starting to change with some companies putting out DVD comps and places like IFC and Sundance showcasing shorts on their channels. But it's still a far cry from the days when shorts would be shown before a feature.

[npcoombs]

Most fiction shorts are awful, documentary shorts tend to be better.

The only shorts I usually watch are in the 'International Selection' at major film festivals... and even then its hit and miss... some great stuff mixed in with some curiously awful films...

Try the FourDocs website for some good short doc films...

[steve hyde]

Most fiction shorts are awful, documentary shorts tend to be better.

The only shorts I usually watch are in the 'International Selection' at major film festivals... and even then its hit and miss... some great stuff mixed in with some curiously awful films...

Try the FourDocs website for some good short doc films...

is this it?

http://www.channel4.com/fourdocs/

Thanks, I'll check it out.

I think we all agree that the vast majority of short fiction films are shite. I still suspect that short-form fiction is the best domain to learn to direct actors and to create time-economical cinematic presentations....

In other words, It's the best place to learn the craft of scene construction for feature length films. I think the reason so many of the films are shite is because it is the most difficult kind of film to make; probably more difficult than a feature since the filmmaker is so constrained by time.

Furthermore, I think a filmmaker might learn more from failing at a short fiction film than succeeding with a documentary. As a student filmmaker,
in the throes of my first filmmaking experiences, I'm quickly learning that the filmmaking experience itself is far more valuable to me than the films I create. I want the films to turn out well, to be sure, but getting lucky on a first, second or third film might be less valuable in the long run, although luck might help me find money to make more films, but it is trying difficult things and failing then learning from mistakes and trying again that will make me a better filmmaker.

All this said, I have been pursuing documentaries not short fiction films. I'm making plans to attempt some short fiction.

Steve

[npcoombs]

Furthermore, I think a filmmaker might learn more from failing at a short fiction film than succeeding with a documentary.

Yes, I think despite the current vogue for documentaries, the reality is that narrative fiction is a lot more difficult to get your head around. Particularly when you are starting out and you don't have the immense division of labour to specialize in each department. There are just a lot more variables and a lot more pre-visualisation required than in documentaries. I am finding my first fiction short a quantum leap in difficulty from what I have done before, which were (like them or dismiss them) very authored pieces, even if not narrative fiction.

Equally, fiction films have a tendency to draw from a pretty narrow vein or various tropes, chiches and 'acceptable' themes and topics, such that the language for exploring alternative ways of doing things is very hard to grasp.

[Evan Kubota]

Equally, fiction films have a tendency to draw from a pretty narrow vein or various tropes, chiches and 'acceptable' themes and topics, such that the language for exploring alternative ways of doing things is very hard to grasp.

Yes...

I saw the shorts program that I previously linked to (http://www.worldaccordingtoshorts.com/) on Friday night. This was quite interesting. One short was awful, one was mediocre, and I won't go into those here. The other four ranged from fairly good to excellent.

The opening piece was about a bored, bourgeois couple who got each other off by concocting fantasies about the new maid (she's a thief, she's stealing from us now, etc.). Many of the film incorporated 'games' as these seemed to be perfectly suited for the short form. Well-shot, well-acted, etc. Kind of like Cronenberg set in Chile.

The second film was about a group of eight old workers heading into the mountains of Norway. They find a woman trapped in a bog and easily free her. After standing around for a few moments and seeing her walk away, thanking them, they find themselves stuck. Over the period of the day, they sink further in, and by nightfall, they have disappeared under the surface (oh yeah, they sing Internationale to pass the time).

The next piece was from Poland and one of the best, called 'Antichrist.' This was sort of like Lord of the Flies set in a barren, decontextualized post-apocalyptic world marked by frequent, unexplained tremors/explosions and a quasi-lunar landscape. It follows a pack of feral kids and the power struggles/games between one who seems to be more 'normal' and the de facto leader who claims to be the Antichrist. This was extremely effective at establishing a cyclical pace, with scenes adding to a sort of accretion of plot (to borrow Bordwell's term) rather than progressing in a conventional narrative fashion. The ending is pitch-perfect. This was 28 minutes long but felt shorter; the director clearly has a good grasp of making a film concise.

Finally, there was 'Ring of Fire,' an animated film from Germany. This was amazing, drawing on cinema discrepant (a voiceover seemingly unrelated to action) as it elliptically presented, without any diegetic dialogue, a narrative about two 'cowboys' and their quest for love or sex. The imagery was continuously inventive, but what I found most impressive about this short was the ability to use just enough of conventional narrative tropes and cliches to make it familiar while incorporating new ideas and visual patterns to make it more engaging. The tension between these two tendencies made it highly watchable, and combined with excellent use of the score, this was the most rewarding of the films in the group.

What I learned, then - you probably need far less plot than you think. There probably isn't time in a short to present a three-act structure. At most you can sketch out a situation and some difficulties, and then a conclusion. The Norway piece (eight old men in a bog) could be summarized in a sentence but had enough story to fill eight minutes. Film is always, in a sense, less 'efficient' than writing but this is highlighted especially in the short form.

[Plastik]

Also a good site…

http://www.shortfilmcentral.com

[steve hyde]

What I learned, then - you probably need far less plot than you think. There probably isn't time in a short to present a three-act structure. At most you can sketch out a situation and some difficulties, and then a conclusion. The Norway piece (eight old men in a bog) could be summarized in a sentence but had enough story to fill eight minutes. Film is always, in a sense, less 'efficient' than writing but this is highlighted especially in the short form.

...interesting reactions to the short films you watched.

"Three act structure" is a term with multiple definitions and clearly the definition that most people subscribe to is the one most closely aligned with feature filmmaking: e.g. first act builds character development and ends with an inciting incident that launches the second act which is the story of choices the character makes in reaction to the inciting incident followed by a third (and shortest) act that is the story of the impact of the choices made followed by some form of resolution or closure. That is the general structure of the typical feature film, right?

Shorts cannot really do all of that. There just isn't enough time to design and build all that emotional architecture. This is why it tends to be a mistake to try to make a short film like a short feature because it is tough to resolve some great tragedy or dramatic plot in 15 minutes.

So we can say, as Evan does above, the short film requires "less plot than you think". I'm not sure what he means, but I think he raises an important point about the structure of short films. Short films cannot do what feature films can do. The short film should be structured differently and the short film should work in the service of different kinds of stories.

What kinds of stories? I'm not sure...

Short stories are the easiest to adapt into 120 page feature screenplays.
Epic novels are nearly impossible to adapt into feature films. What kinds of stories are a good fit for short-form fiction?...."Flash fiction"? Again, I don't know..

I don't think there is any escaping the three act structure though since all *coherent stories* have a beginning, middle and end. For a short the three act structure needs to be formed differently and I think Raskin's seven parameters are an attempt to speak to this fact: the fact that shorts require a different architectural design than features.

Steve

[steve hyde]

...I revised to text in the original post. I think it would be productive for us to pursue a discussion about each of the seven parameters when it seems appropriate, by citing examples in works that we have seen or our own work.

Steve

[keagan]

I haven't had a chance to go back and re-visit the original points yet, but I had a thought yesterday.
We'r all talking about shorts, but there is a vast diffenence in the structure and the storytelling in a 2 minute fiction short as opposed to a 15 minute fiction short. When dealing with features, the addition of 1/2 hour of screen time probablly won't affect the structure of your story. But even adding minutes to a short will change the devices you need to employ to tell your story

Keagan

[npcoombs]

Shorts cannot really do all of that. There just isn't enough time to design and build all that emotional architecture. This is why it tends to be a mistake to try to make a short film like a short feature because it is tough to resolve some great tragedy or dramatic plot in 15 minutes.

Yeah I understand what you are saying on an artistic/theoretical level, but people make 3 act structured shorts to demonstrate that they can. Who is going to give you the money to go on to make longer pieces if you cant show a mastery of that structure in the short form?

No one goes from arty, plotless shorts to features in the real world. So here we are again at the theory that shorts are only good as a training ground for longer works...

...but more than that it is the distinction between art and commerce. Art for arts sake, or art as utility. My favourite shorts have always been more or less plotless, but those directors will have to prove themselves in the world of plot to progress.