Short Research

A Short is any film that is not long enough to be classed as "feature length". While there is no strict boundary to say how long a short should be, it is typicall 40 minutes or less including all credits and titles. The most common place for a film to be screened is at a film festival, or on the internet. They are usually non profit films as the majority of them do not enter the cinema's. Smaller film companys often make short films to prove their talent, as they do not have the money to make a full length film.

A company that make a large range of short films are "FutureShorts" they operate out of a youtube channel and make a wide variety of shorts on an array of different topics. They are a very big company and some of their videos gain upwards of 10 million views.

Black Hole
Black Hole is a short film made by FutureShorts.




This film has no clear storyline, and is based entirely on this hole in a piece of paper that allows the character to reach through any solid surface. It is very cleverly done though, because one of the main conventions of this short is that it has no dialouge. They manage to present this film, so you clearly know whats happening without the use of speech at all. At the end of the film, another common convention of shorts is shown. There is a big twist to the storyline where the man gets stuck in the safe. Twists are very common at the end of shorts and sometimes have shocking effects on the audience. The titles and credits in this short are very basic, and are on a black background. This is common on shorts as in feature length films, the titles can grip the audience, but with a short film, you do not need to catch the audiences attention as much due to the fact the film is not as long, so the audience needs less encouragement to pay attention.

Occupied

Occupied is another film short made by FutureShorts about a woman who is on a plane and in the toilet.



In this film the woman in the toilet is seen unveiling hidden objects hidden all over her body. In todays modern world, some would assume she is a terrorist, from the nature of her actions on a plane. This film short also has no dialouge, which is commonly used throughout shorts. It also has a twist at the end, where she is doing all of this just so she can have a ciggarette. So these are two common conventions of shorts. The titles are also simple much like the black hole. Except this time the titles are over a video background of something relating to the film, to set the scene.


After analysing these shorts, we have noticed a few conventions we are going to try to use when creating our film short.

• A lot of shorts have single or very few characters. So when thinking of film ideas, we are going to try keep the number of characters in our film to a minimum. 
• Little or no dialouge, it is very difficult to explain a story without the use of dialouge, and FutureShorts do this very well. In our short, we are going to try and keep the dialouge short and only use it when we have to. 
• Titles and credits are very simple, We are going to keep simple fonts and keep them short. We will incorporate both conventions of short titles, and put the main part of them on a background seperate from the film, then try and work a part of the titles into the background of the film. 
• We will try to put a twist at the end of our short, as it is a common technique that seems to work well.

Our next step is to pitch individual ideas to the group and decide on a final film idea.