ASK & DISCUSS
INDEXShort film - how long the poor relation?
7 years, 7 months ago - Glyn Carter
We don’t make shorts for money, do we. Frankly, you’d lose less money buying lottery scratchcards than making a film. No, we make them first for experience, then for recognition. They are a calling-card, right? A stepping stone on the way to a career in features or TV.
And festival laurels are more important than racking up lots of views, because laurels are recognised as a mark of quality.
So frankly, it’s not worth promoting your last short. Better to put your effort and cash into the next one.
Anyway, we’re told that there’s no audience. But if so, how come some short films on You Tube get over a million views? There is an audience, and I’m sure it’s growing. Because more and more people watch stuff on their smartphones and tablets on the go, on trains, in cafes, before bed. And they soon want something more substantial that skateboarding kittens and clickbait. Apply the cheap production technology we now have, and the 21st century is creating a perfect storm for us filmmakers.
I’d go so far as to say that after 100 years of being the poor relation, short film as a format is placed for an online boom in coming years.
One missing element is still needed, and that’s a supporting “cultural infrastructure”: review and ratings sites, interviews, word-of-mouth, and sharing. Something like the indie music sector has. Build this up, build the audience base, and someone will work out how to monetize short films on a much wider scale – as they have with indie music.
I’m a writer and filmmaker, and I’m setting up a new website, www.shortfilmreviews.video, as my contribution. If you’re interested in having your short film reviewed and entered into our annual festival, please email info@shortfilmreveiws.video for details.
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7 years, 7 months ago - Jane Sanger
Hi Glyn,
Good you are starting this but there are actually loads of platforms out there and a saturated market. Every uni this side of Hadrian's Wall is churning out more and more film graduates making films and with the film makers already in the market short film numbers grows every year.
The second problem is that there are too many platforms and thus diluting a few central places on which to put your shorts and get them reviewed, bought or distributed.eg The Smalls.
Reviews are tbh not worth the paper they are written on, unless the judge/reviewer is top class at this. Ben Rider of Monkey Bread Tree Awards springs to mind, his writing and intuition is fab. Writing reviews is an art form in itself so I don't want any old person writing a lot of drivel about my film when they are not possibly very qualified to do so. Of course you may be an excellent reviewer too, who knows? I don't want to be too negative as your platform may take off, then I'll eat my words - so just stating my opinion.
7 years, 7 months ago - Glyn Carter
Hi Jane - thaks for your opinion, and all discussion is useful. I agree that more and more shorts are being made. But is the market really saturated?
If more films are being made for the same sized audience, then yes, obviously it is, to the point that there is no market at all. But my belief is that we filmmakers haven't recognised the impact of billions of mobile on-the-hoof viewers across the globe, let alone responded to it. The potential audience is growing, and it's actually out-accelerating the number of short films.
We've waited a century for mobile technology and fast-moving culture to match what we do, but we are being outflanked by music and memes. This is tragic when we own the perfect format to deliver emotion and drama in small perfectly-formed chunks.
The problem with most review sites is that they look more towards filmmakers than towards the mass audience. Search tools are clunky or non-existent, and reviews don't tell you whether the film is a good watch. For all Ben's undoubted insight, his reviews don't say what sort of film it is, how long, its genre, or whether it delivers on expectations, and there's no rating, search or filtering.
ShortFilmReviews.video will do all of these. We aim not just to help any filmmaker reach an audience (oh, I forgot to mention that most sites are selective), but to actually increase the size of the audience!
7 years, 7 months ago - Vasco de Sousa
You can make money making short films. Some short films have budgets in the millions. When I worked at BT, there were very expensive short films, starring French and Saunders and John Cleese, used as training videos. Steven de Souza made a living making short films before going into features.
Many of the shorts that are "calling cards" are these kinds of business deals. If you read the biographies of directors, you see that very few of them started out on festival shorts (except for the likes of Andy Warhol), most started on professional shorts and worked for money. (Those who did start with festival shorts were generally film students at the likes of UCLA, NFTS, etc.)