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Let’s make a film! Short films are some of the favourite films at Raindance Film Festival. The beauty of a short film is you don’t need to have experience, money or training to make one. A short can be anything from a few seconds (like a Nokia 15 Second Short) to 45 minutes (according to the Oscars™). This short film tool kit shows you how to make a short film.
Check out these 12 steps below to find out how to get your short film made!
The Short Film Tool Kit: 12 Steps To Making A Short
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Step 1. Get a script together
A short film is a unique type of story. Because it is short you can’t use the normal opening story techniques of a feature.
Here’s some ways professional screenwriters create stories for short films. You need to hook your audience. These story techniques condense the opening into a few seconds.
- Universal moment: a short film favourite. Wedding, first kiss, national and religious holidays, championship sporting events
- Cyclical story: stories that tend to start and end at the same place, but there is now new meaning
- Time bomb: where something specific must happen in a certain time or else dire consequences will befall the character
Here’s some idea generation exercises. Can you write a hundred words on one of these? Could it become the basis for a short film?
– the office prank
– a day in the life of …
– the local bus stop
There are loads of tricks to generate ideas for shorts.
A script for a short need not be written in industry standard format. But it should be written in what filmmakers call a ‘Shot List’, a simple a one or two line description of each shot the camera takes.
[To get your very own professional script format guide send an email to screenplay@raindance.org]
Check out the other steps below and happy filmmaking!
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About Elliot Grove
Photo Credit Jay Brooks / BIFA 2015
Few people know more filmmakers and screenwriters than Elliot Grove. Elliot is the founder of Raindance Film Festival (1993) and the British Independent Film Awards (1998). He has produced over 700 hundred short films and five feature films: the multi-award-winning The Living and the Dead (2006), Deadly Virtues (2013), AMBER (2017), Love is Thicker Than Water (2018) and the SWSX Grand Jury Prize winner Alice (2019). He teaches screenwriting and producing in the UK, Europe, Asia and America.
Elliot has written three books which have become industry standards: Raindance Writers’ Lab: Write + Sell the Hot Screenplay, now in its second edition, Raindance Producers’ Lab: Lo-To-No Budget Filmmaking and Beginning Filmmaking: 100 Easy Steps from Script to Screen (Professional Media Practice).
In 2009 he was awarded a PhD for services to film education.
