An award winning film

So I had a good weekend. I didn't network nearly as much as I should. It was the closing night party before I really started talking to people. That seems about typical for me: 4 days to break the ice. But in the meantime I saw a lot of good films, many of them under 5 minutes which is the qualification for being a short short. On Saturday though, I left after the afternoon screenings because I was having dinner with Mom and Dad. Dad asked me what I was missing by having dinner with them and I said the Jury Awards and then 2 more screenings. He asked why I didn't want to stay for the awards and I said I wasn't in competition so whatever. (Passing was in competition for a Jury prize at Woods Hole and they had asked me to send extra DVDs to give to the jury judges.) Then the next morning I was checking Facebook and the festival had listed the award winners so I looked.

Killer won for best short short.

But now I'm back to finishing the last of the semester. I'm working on my design statement which is the final  paper for Thesis Prep. It's basically take everything we've been talking about all semester and apply it to one of your films in no more than 8 pages. She's given us a bunch of specific questions to answer, one of which is "Why is your film best told in the short film format." Having just been at the festival where there were features, shorts, and short shorts and where one of the standard Q&A questions was "What's your next project?" I get frustrated with filmmakers who make shorts only as a stepping stone to making features. I love shorts. Shorts are like poems, and short shorts are like haiku. Every word, every syllable counts. Every image must be important. It would be nice in a feature if every frame were important but it would be hard to maintain that over the 123,840 frames of a typical indie feature. (As opposed to the 6,480 frames in Take Out.) A feature is more like a downhill ski race. You pre-visualize the course, pick the certain moments where you have to make the turn, and then what happens in between those moments has room for fudging. But not so much in a short. Your storytelling has to be focused. You have to know exactly what you want to say, get in, say it, and get out. And once you know exactly what you want to say you have to maximize every tool at your disposal to say it. It requires a clarity of thought and vision. In some ways it is so much more challenging to make a good short. Yes, making a generic short is easier than making a generic feature. There is 1/10th of the amount of work in terms of how much pre-production and how much shooting and how much editing. But telling a good story in only 9 minutes instead of 90? When you've got 90 minutes or so you can get around to making your point. Your characters can eventually do something that gets the audience to connect with them. You can put in those really artistic shots that look great but don't really advance your story. When you only have 9 minutes you can't get around to anything, by the time you've gotten around to it your story is done. Everything you do has to be better.

Now, how to say all that without sounding like I'm whining about people who do rambling indie features.