Besides the obvious, there is no good reason to attempt to start your film career by making shorts. Granted, the obvious reason remains something of an ace – they are shorter, but not only are short stories harder to tell well, telling them is little like telling long stories. Perfecting the art of the short is definitely an end in itself.

Three act structure is regularly confused with the idea that everything has a “Beginning” “Middle” and “End”. Short films do have these but true three act structure imposes a series of formal demands, an inciting incident, a down point, a middle section twice the length of the start and end that is itself bisected by the story’s key turn. These ideas offer a proven method of shaping a story over 90 minutes but are not inviolable truths that apply to all narrative forms. Compressing three act structure for your short film is usually a mistake.

Many of the best shorts express a single idea or emotion. The best rely on subtly and nuance to create a story bigger than the one presented. A great example is Lynne Ramsay’s “Gas Man” which presents a child’s perspective on an meeting and tells a story the audience understands before the protagonist does. It is the apparent simplicity that gives films like this their elegance and power, they imply a richer and more complicated story but leave it to the audience to tell.

Meaning can either be declared or built. The constraint of a short film often leads filmmakers to take the latter route – ending with a speech or heavy look to camera or one of the big simple events that needs no explanation (death, a kiss). Declaring your meaning is not only shallow, it’s dull because it largely invalidates the process. Ten minutes of events ending in a speech about racism is adding ten unnecessary minutes into a speech about racism.

All built meaning is understood through juxtaposition. In a feature film this is generally done by putting events alongside each other. One action causes another and by travelling with the characters through a string of such casualties we build for ourselves an understanding. Three Act Structure is a popular map of this process but without enough time to let all the events build into a story, you have to look instead for the other elements that can be made to sit significantly beside each other. A character in an unexpected location, someone saying something the audience thinks they will not say, a single change to an established pattern.

Absence can be a great tool because audiences are adept at investing spaces with story, like how cake crumbs in a fridge tell a story about my lunch. Painters and photographers become especially adept at telling stories in this way using an absence or surprise to make us build a story from a single image. Another great example of how to make the audience build your story from the most economical elements possible is the six word novel apocryphally attributed to Ernest Hemingway and “published” as a newspaper small ad in order to win a bet.

“For sale. Baby Shoes. Never Worn.”