Short vs Shorter.
As keen readers and those of you able to scroll down to earlier entries will know, last week I took part in the third brilliant Shooting People Branchage Film Surgery at the Hospital Club in Covent Garden. We watched a bunch of increasingly brilliant films and with Phil, Hannah and James, I did my best to think of helpfully critical things to say about them.
A nice upshot of these events are the people you meet at them. In the pub afterwards I met Allan Gichigi who’s cracking short documentary about the illegal Kenyan public transport system can be found here: http://shootingpeople.org/watch/film.php?film_id=78264
I also met a guy called Andrew who has since emailed me to say “…I’m busy in pre-production on a 10ish minute [film] which is to be filmed in January so hopefully by Spring I will have a lovely little film and lots more raring to go. Actually – that was something I meant to ask you on the night; how big a benchmark is 10 minutes do you think? By going over that are you severely restricting the exposure you can get from festivals? I know you and Chris have made shorts of varying lengths, so thought you might have some interesting things to say on the matter.
All the very best,
Andrew”
Being always happy to talk at length about the things I think I wrote him a reply and since it was actually about film I thought it might be of interest to you my dear Shooting reader.
Hallo Andrew!
The significance of the duration of a short film is relatively simple… the shorter something is the easier it is to programme and the less daunting it is to watch.
So as far as programmers, broadcasters, sales agents and distributors go under five minutes is golden because it’s far easier to slip it in to a tight schedule. It means that rather than agonising over whether film A is better than film B, they can just show both. Since their job is entirely about agonising over which films to show anything that helps lessen the load is always welcomed with open arms. This is especially the case where the screen time is expensive.
As far as the audience goes, well, increasingly I’d say that most shorts are watched singularly and online. They are browsing material. They’re not something you settle down in front of at the end of a long day, but something you grab a glance at when you have five minutes and you should be doing something else. The phrase “when you have five minutes” is apt, it’s not so often that people find themselves with ten, or fifteen, or twenty minutes because that’s more like a proper amount of time they could spend doing something else.
Also, and perhaps more importantly, most people are surprisingly polite when it comes to film – or at least they are when they press play. Very few people actively start a film of any length thinking “well if it’s shit I’ll turn it off”. Which is odd because most people probably do turn it off when it is. However on the whole the majority assume that they’re comitting to the full run time. Equally though most people assume that a short film probably isn’t that good. This is partly because most shorts don’t come with the sort of comforting fanfare that features get but mainly because most short films aren’t that good. Most short films are actively awful.
The upshot of which is that if I see a film is five minutes long I think “OK, why not, I can bare five minutes of awfulness”, but when I see it is ten minutes I start to doubt it’s worth pressing play… does it sound interesting? Is there a good image that draws me in? Is there someone in it I recognise? Is the director a friend? Do I actually have to…? By the time it’s hitting fifteen to twenty minutes I pretty much have to be, I don’t know, sat on a chair in front of a room full of strangers who have all turned up to hear my thoughts on it, like a weird and twisted nightmare in which I haven’t done my homework and I now have to give a presentation about it. Which is why I often look so pale during the Surgery.
Obviously if a film is a good, or dare I say it, brilliant, you can get away with it. Over the years I’ve heard a great many prescriptions for how long a short should be but the only one that really stands up is that it should be as long as it deserves to be. As long as the story can sustain. One thing that I have noticed is that there are too many shorts made by people who are aping feature pacing without understanding why this pace is requried. A good example is the last film in last week’s surgery. Much of the best stuff in the film was creating a mood and atmosphere, a sense of the character. Some of the most delicious passages in cinema history are sections where the story appears to stop and you just hang out with the main character and many short film makers attempt to get this atmosphere into their films. However the key thing in the last sentence is ‘appears’ to stop. In any well made film you never ever see or hear anything that isn’t giving the audience something which propels the ideas of the film toward their conclusion. All too often short filmmakers don’t know what their story actually is, as was clearly the case with the last film in the surgery. Consequently the mood and atmosphere that they mirror from a feature film is telling the audience nothing they need to know about this short story. So the film looks lovely, but bores.
All of which is a round the houses way of trying to explain the other maxim about duration in shorts – whatever length your film is, it is too long. Obviously this doesn’t hold true for everybody but it’s a damn good thought to hold onto because in most cases you can shave ten percent of what you think is the perfect length and you’ll end up with a film which is far more enjoyable for audiences.