I say it a lot, but I really believe that when it comes to short films, simplicity is best.
The problem is, simplicity is deceptively difficult.
It’s so easy to get carried away and stuff your story with unnecessary subplots, characters, and moments. Before you know it, your short film has turned into a wanna-be feature film.
Story scope and redundancy are usually the main culprits.
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Story Scope
I covered this in-depth in a YouTube video (oops, is this newsletter redundant?) but the basics are: some stories want to be shorts, and some want to be features.
The difference is scope. Big stories vs. small stories.
You get in trouble when you try to force a 10 pound story into a 1 pound sack.
But there’s hope. If you want to make a short but all your stories are too big, you can probably boil them down to their absolute core and find a great short film.
For example: Instead of a film about the family vacation from hell (big story)…
What if you boiled it all down to just their drive to the airport (small story)?
Is that possible? I think so.
First, figure this out:
Underneath everything that happens, what is the foundational issue that makes it the vacation from hell?
Then figure this out:
Can that core of the story be shown & resolved in a smaller way in a single car ride?
Redundant Moments
It’s so, so easy to be redundant in a film.
Many times, we over-explain or over-show to make a point clear to the audience, but don’t realize that we’ve already established that point in a previous story beat.
For example: In an effort to show that a character’s life is mundane, you show a montage of her going through her boring daily routine 3 times.
You could have shown me the routine once and I would have understood.
But… you know what would have been impressive? If you figured out a way to show the mundanity of her routine with a single moment.
How could you do that? Really, think about it.
Much harder right? Well, that’s why simplicity is difficult.
The most insidious version of redundancy: when you include a scene that FEELS like it’s providing something new to the audience, when in reality, it’s only a more specific version of something we’ve already seen.
This happens all the time, in so many different ways – for example, a character SAYING something we already suspected her.
Often a quick, wordless reaction that hints at a character’s opinion or thoughts, is way more effective (and efficient) than an entire scene that spells out her beliefs later on.
Those are usually the scenes that end up on the cutting room floor. (Unfortunately, it’s often only when your film’s runtime is bloated and something NEEDS to go that you’ll realize the power of cutting that baggage out of your film.)
And hot take, but I think specificity with a character’s feeling is overrated.
The audience craves playing the role of deciphering your characters’ feelings. Don’t rob them of that fun by having your characters just spell it out…
A shameless plug:
The video I posted this week is one of my favorites in a while: How to “Make It” in Film today (5 paths). Big thanks to filmmakers Jim Cummings (Thunder Road, The Beta Test) and Julian Terry (They Hear It, Whisper) for contributing! I’m adding extended versions of their interviews to Wrapped.
Favorites this week:
🍿 Movie: Civil War
Between Ex Machina, Annihilation, and Men, writer/director Alex Garland has not missed yet for me, so I was so excited to catch this on opening night.
It was solid, but ended up being my least favorite of his movies purely because the story was much more predictable and traditional than the others. Still well worth seeing though.
💬 Quote: “It’s not what a movie is about, it’s how it is about it.” -Roger Ebert
That’s it for this week.
Let’s make some movies.
-Kent
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