Short Films

 

I researched into short films in order to understand what a short film is expected to do for an audience and what codes & conventions lie within short films.

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About

 

The first point is the length. Short films can vary from as short as 3 minutes to 25 minutes but despite how long it is, most of these films can portray a great amount of power and meaning. For our production we are expected to produce a short film between 4 and 5 minutes. I also found that when looking at the storyline of short film production there is more visual action as suppose to heavy dialogue which gets across the meaning of the film, thus being more efficient with the time length given. The narrative itself is often very condensed in comparison to that of full-length film to eliminate a large backstory and instead allows the film to jump straight into the high-paced action. A lot of short films that are produced are creatively inspired due to the lack of budget that they are given as well. This also pushed production companies to create for a niche audience. Characters in short films have a limited time to be introduced with rich backstories and have even less time to make any substantial development throughout the short period of time they are given. As a solution the amount of characters are reduced which allows the audience t connect to all characters and remember key information about each one. Our film production should only include 3 or 4 characters at the most so that the audience can keep track of the events.

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Swede

 

Although last year we focused on film openings as suppose to a whole film, we did have some practice at doing this with our swedes that we produced. This was a small task that was given to us to film and edit in a couple of days. This allowed us to use digital technologies creatively as well as adding comedy aspects into our short production. We had to be aware of our small time limit we were given so made sure that we focused on the key parts of our chosen film: Jurassic World.

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