Short Film Introduction

Definition:
Any film that has a duration longer than 1 minute and shorter than 15 minutes.

Background:
When films just started being produced short films were very common and it wasn't until the 1920s that longer films started becoming more popular. Comedy's, animated cartoons and newsreels were often shown in the cinema's lasting between 5-10 minutes. By the mid 1950s with the rise of television short films were virtually non-existant. Today they are still relatively unknown however have been making a come back with several websites posting them online, as well as DVD's being placed on the market which contain a variety of short films for viewers to watch.

The man above is American actor William Garwood, he starred in many short films lasting only 20 minutes in length.

Audience:
The type of people that tend to watch short films nowadays are those which are film enthusiasts, meaning people which have a keen interest in films. In general speaking terms they tend to be of a higher status and seek thrilling or alternative plot lines compared to main stream films. Short films commonly have an increasingly more complex storyline than longer films and writers/directors often play around with the narrative in order to give the target audience something new and different compared to the average film viewed at the cinema.

Examples:

I particularly liked this short film. I thought it was a good example of how you can take quite a simple idea of a man in a ordinary office attempting to photocopy something end end up creating a really effective idea. This being that this black hole enables him to get to things he otherwise wouldn't be able to reach. It starts off as something minor like a chocolate bar and then progresses on to something far bigger which is lots of money in the save. As well as taking a simple idea and progressing it into something good, the creator also added a comedy moment at the end when the man wasn't able to get out of the save and was subsequently trapped inside. I liked how only one character was needed, a simple location and no dialogue was used to create what in my opinion is a really strong short film.

This is a similar idea to the first example and is also staged in an office. In this one I like how they have used a split screen so you can see the male and the females actions which are in sinc with one another. As an audience you can see by their actions and facial expressions that they really like each other and I especially like the fact this message in conveyed through the use of post-it notes and not through dialogue, as though as the post-its act as a sign to them they should be with one another.

My last example uses a technique which is quite different and one which I have never personally used before. I like how the voiceover tell the story and the fact that drawings are used to animate the storyline rather than real life characters. The drawings are very simply and not particularly fancy but it is still effective because the voice over comes across as very straight to the point and goes through the stages rather quickly so the audience are kept occupied and intrigued.