#3 Studying Short Films

The concept of short films was an area that I had little knowledge in, I had seen a few short films before when played on the TV, but I had nowhere near enough knowledge to make a short film of my own. I began my research by looking at websites that are well known for short films. I remember hearing somewhere that BBC have a BBC Film Network, and a part of this is BBC Shorts. This is a website for screening short films that have been created, and by looking at this I could gain an understanding of what the whole concept of short films was about. This website also helped me to find out about the purpose of the short film industry, and how these short films are distributed. There are many reasons why people create short films, for example, they could simply enjoy pieces of film work, or they may want to gain experience as beginners, or to gain recognition in the industry by demonstrating their skills. Short films could also test an idea that someone has for a feature film, or like the film 'Smashed' be created to educate an audience. As 'Smashed' was created for Sommerset Police to inform about alcohol awareness. The audiences differ depending on the context of the film so there is many reasons why people would choose to watch these films. The most common method for distribution is online via YouTube and various other video websites such as Vimeo, however some short films are also distributed on TV or via DVD. Another way that short films can be shown to people is via film festivals. In our media class, we went on a trip to the European Independent Film Festival, in Paris. Below is the flyer for the film festival and also the time schedule for all the different films.

Flyer:

Film Schedule:

Researching:

As you can see from the above print screen of the BBC Shorts website, it hosts a large collection of different short films, which helped me to gain an understanding of conventions, and how the overall plot works. There was over 72 comedy short films for me to look at, and a large amount of horror short films. This benefited me a lot, so I began to look for other places to watch short films.

I then looked at Channel 4's collection of short films, although this collection was not as large as the BBC Short's collection, there was several very good films that I watched to help me. But these websites only show short films that have been recognised, I wanted to watch short films that had not yet been recognised, films that had not been created by well recognised, up and coming directors. I decided to go to YouTube, to see what short films had been uploaded there.

My search for 'short films' on YouTube got me several thousand results, so I began to shorten down the results by searching for 'short films of the horror genre' and 'short films of the comedy genre'. From watching these I had been slightly more persuaded to make a horror film, as the horror films all seemed to look better and seem less 'beginner' than the comedy films.

Below are my notes on the short film industry.