Write Compelling Short Films (Screenwriting Tricks)

Short films. They're different beast than features for one. Shorts demands simplicity. Shorts are about one thing. No be stories, no subplots. Just one thing, one location, one problem. And it escalated to surprising results. I like to think of it like a thread on a sweater. You present the sweater, you present the thread, you pull the thread and you watch the sweater unravel. But you don't to stop there. You have to take it beyond that. It's going to go to unravel the pants, the carpet, the furniture, the house, the planet Earth. You've got to establish a concept. Let people imagine its potential, deliver on that potential and then surpass it. And this is a big thing for me. You cannot cram a feature length film into a short film shorts that do that. They're not shorts. They're jorts. And shorts are not a good idea. Ever commit to jeans or commit the shorts? You cannot have both. Ironically, with all my talk here about characters and the importance of believable characters and deep characters, there is such a thing actually as unnecessary character development. Now, I'll give you a example. I made a short film called Tempo a few years back about a gun that can speed up and slow down objects in their physical trajectory. And that right there is all it ever needed to be about, at least is a short. But at that point, I had made three short films, Red Giant, the most recent at the time of being formed, 17 in which we were able to tell a small, little character driven story disguised as sketch comedy. So I was hungry to expand on that. And one of the makes I wanted to make a sci fi action short, but I wanted to make people feel things. So I committed the sin of injecting story into something. I contrived this idealistic struggle between good and evil and this unearned emotional weight between two characters. It didn't work. It bordered on dumb. The action is cool, but you have to sit through a lot of nonsense to get to it. And it's entirely my fault as a writer. It's easy to deceive yourself when you're talking about things like character and story. But for a short film, the minimum viable product was the simple as possible version that can go to market is always the best. It's okay if the stakes are small. Missing the ice cream truck is obviously insignificant compared to stopping global thermonuclear war. But maybe in the world of your film, missing the ice cream truck is the needs to be the worst possible thing that could possibly happen. Those are the stories that we want.

Channel: Plot Devices

Views: 27,236

Keywords: Storyclock, writing, filmmaking, screenwriting, Seth Worley, gaming, screenplay, writing 101, writing 201, director, filmmaker, screenwriter, notebook, storyboard, workbook, story break, story, storytelling, story structure, Joseph Campbell, Brian mckee, Sid field

Id: MHr2orc8M6U

Length: 2min 11sec (131 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 10 2023