Research: Short Films

To get started, we looked the history of short films and where they originated. They started in the 1910's in the United States. They were first known as short subjects which followed features and could be either animated cartoons or live action. They were usually comedies and some were in the structure of travelogues. From the 1930's till the 1960's, short films started to become minimal, resulting in disappearing in total. It was only in the 1980's that the short subjects were known to be 'short films'. In the modern age, they are seen as contemporary non-commercial motion pictures which are shorter than feature films.

We then looked at some short films to give us an idea of the codes and conventions of short films and to aid us in coming up with some initial ideas. We looked at 'Signs' which was a simple romantic comedy where no dialogue was used, but words on paper. This introduced us to simplicity and how we could make effective short films with simplistic ideas. We also looked at 'About a girl' which was a social realism/ drama which followed a girl on her way to a canal as she talks about specific events in her life, resulting to her dumping a new born baby into the canal. This introduced us to the idea of an ending with a twist which catches the audience off guard. This was another element to consider when coming up with a film idea. We watched 2 other films, Harvey Krumpet and Black Button, both of which were created out of different Medias (animation and film).

From watching these shorts, we concluded these typical conventions of short films:

1. They are between 5 and 20 minutes.
2. They consist of a beginning, middle and end.
3. They tend to be low budget films, using low quality effects such as the white space in 'Black Button', which was basically a white sheet and made to look smoother with an effect from the editing software they used.
4. They look more gritty and realistic than smooth and glossy.
5. They are low key, putting character names at the end or not including them at all as they are unknown and aren't significant in comparison to big budget films.
6. The narratives tend to be original.

We all created a PowerPoint (Saira, Kaltrina, Jessica) on one of the short films we saw and commented on the different shots and general conventions such as the camera and mise-en-scene and how it was typical to their genre.

With the research taken into account, we discussed what type of genre we would be interested in doing and decided upon a romantic comedy.

Saira's Powerpoint // Jessica's Powerpoint // Kaltrina's Powerpoint