Experimental Short Film Project

EXPERIMENTAL SHORT FILM

For this week, we start shooting and editing. I have shown you already some samples of good short films of last year's Cannes Festival, some films I have discovered at the Toronto Film Festival archives and Raymond Red's "Anino" - Cannes Best Short Film.

Since what we will be doing in this class is mainly editing, I am giving more weight for the creativity in trimming sequences, smoothening of clips and juxtaposition of visuals, and titling (text). Added bonus will be given for those who will apply photocomposition on their shots, basic shooting angles.

I enjoin you to read first Chapter 15 of the book "Writing the Short Film" by Patricia Cooper and Ken Dancyger. Your class beadle has a photocophy of the whole chapter, or you can borrow the book from our library. I will put my copy at the Reserve Section this week.

Shoots must be done outside the class hour schedule. You have to attend still our classes for editing. Having to do the short film does not mean I will not give lectures. All editing must be done during class hours, except for extraordinary cases, in which case you have to reserve the editing bay ahead of schedule and the reservation must be accomplished. Please follow the procedures on equipment reservations of the Mass Communication Laboratory.

Deadline of submission in VHS format of all short films will be September 6, 2004 (Monday). You can also submit your entries to Rough Cut show 7PM this last Thursday of September at the MTS-Kanto Bar, Matina.

SOME NOTES ON SHORT FILMS
Mass Communication Department
Ateneo de Davao University
MC 350: Nonlinear Video Editing
Bong S. Eliab

EDITING SHORT FILMS
INTRODUCTION

Today in Hollywood it is far easier to get an agent, producer or production executive to view a short film than it is to read a feature length screenplay. (Short form screenplays go virtually unread at studios and agencies.) The reasons are obvious. It takes less time to watch a short film than to read a script, and if it’s good, it’s far more enjoyable. (For our purposes, a short film generally means a running time less than 45 minutes, and usually less than thirty.)

The short film, whether made on a university campus or independently financed, continues to be a well-traveled road into the film business. Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, John Carpenter, to name a famous few, all started this way. Lucas and Carpenter expanded their student films into low-budget features; the others used short films as calling cards to production executives and producers who championed them and launched their careers. On the basis of his short film, Sidney Sheinberg recognized Steven Spielberg’s talent and hired him for an episode of Rod Serling’s anthology series "The Night Gallery."

The 1987 blockbuster Fatal Attraction began as a 40-minute short film called Diversion, written and directed by James Dearden. Paramount bought the film and hired Dearden to write the feature length screenplay. More recently, Elaine Holliman’s short film Chicks In White Satin received major attention on the festival circuit. This attention led to a deal with Hollywood Pictures to write and direct a feature length version of her short.

Before these films could turn the heads of Hollywood’s powers that be, they needed a strong story and good screenplay to launch the project. Without a compelling or humorous story to enhance, the visual artistry of a film becomes an end in itself.

The focus of Writing Short Films is on writing the screenplay for the sync sound narrative short film. This is not a manual on filmmaking, geared in any way toward production other than providing the best outline possible of principles and techniques for constructing the short screenplay. This is designed specifically for those wanting to make a narrative-driven short film, and who recognize before production can begin a completed script must be in hand. (Experimental, nonnarrative films are not dealt with.) Though most of the examples I have selected derive from narrative sync sound shorts, these same concepts can be applied to the non-sync sound short films. Examples from Albert Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon and Robert Enrico’s Occurrence At Owl Creek, both essentially non-sync sound films, are used throughout this book.

Many of the concepts presented here for the short film screenplay (10 to 40 pages) are the same for writing a feature length screenplay (90 to 130 pages). But there are major differences, too. Not only do shorts differ from feature films in the size and scope of the drama, but in plot structure, too. A short film can focus on and develop the conflict in one incident to great effect where a feature film must relate a number of them and generally in less depth. For example, both Pepe Danquart’s Black Rider and Sam Karmann’s Omnibus, two Academy Award-winning live action short films, explore incidents on a bus in the midst of a commute. Both are less than 12 minutes long.

The principles of conflict and character do not change for a short film, but many of the rules do. For instance, a requisite for success in a feature is a sympathetic protagonist. A short film, however, may succeed primarily because it examines an unsympathetic protagonist who is fascinating. Short films often effectively deal with difficult themes longer mainstream feature films avoid.

The contemporary viewer has been conditioned for most his viewing life by Hollywood’s three act structure and reality-based requirements. That makes him less familiar with the composition of a short film, visually and artistically. This allows the short-form filmmaker to take more chances. A shorter running time allows the filmmaker more freedom of expression in the sense that character can be examined with less subordination to the all-important plot of a feature. With lower budgets, filmmakers remain in firm control. Commercial restrictions that can inhibit feature filmmakers, keeping them from taking risks with their works, don’t apply to the short film.

A short film (also short or short subject) is a motion picture that is shorter than the average feature film. Definition of maximum length vary from 10 or 40 minutes (AMPAS rule) to about 80 minutes. The short-form film is to the full length film what the short story is to a full-fledged novel. [The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) is a professional honorary organization, founded on May 11, 1927 in California to advance the arts and sciences of motion pictures. The Academy is known around the world for its annual Academy Awards, informally known as the "Oscars." This is reflected in the name of the Academy's Website: http://www.oscars.org/]

The short film, in theatrical environment usually shown prior to the feature, is usually less complex and covers only one main or a limited number of narrative arcs and threads. Most films of this genre focus on one character or show one special incident. The structure often resembles that of a Joke or stories usually told by Word of mouth. The short film is able to focus on difficult topics full-length films usually avoid. Its filmmakers benefit from larger freedoms and can take higher risks with their films.

The genre itself splits into several sub-categories, mainly:

* Live action short
* Animated short (hand-drawn or CGI/Computer-generated imagery)
* Documentary short subject
* Experimental or abstract short films

Today short films are usually shown on dedicated short film festivals rather than prior to features (a habit Pixar seems to change). They are popular as first steps into the cinematic art among young filmmakers and with the advent of broadband internet connections increasingly popular among users outside the traditional short film scene. That film making becomes cheaper and cheaper with prosumer or semi-professional cameras costing under USD 3000 and any PC can do video editing and post-production including DVD authoring with free or low-cost software programs.

The roots of the short film genre lie deep in cinematic history itself. The earliest examples of motion pictures were short films. The first shows of the brothers Lumière were merely a few minutes long. It took several years until the multi-reel film and later the full-length film took over.

Live Action Short Film
Live action refers to films and movies that are acted out by actual flesh-and-blood actors, as opposed to cartoon characters or computer-generated imagery. When used as a description of a Hollywood movie or any other motion picture, the phrase is used to specify that the film is not a cartoon. This is important in situations when the film in question is inspired by a cartoon, such as the Flintstones or Dennis the Menace movies.

For long periods of time the majority of live action adaptations of previously animated or comic book stories, especially ones with heavy scifi or fantasy elements, were considered poor until the advent of better special effects. However, many still view such adaptations with suspicion.

The term is also used within the animation world to refer to non-cartoon characters. For example, in a movie such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, where humans and cartoons co-exist, "live action" characters are the "real" actors, such as Bob Hoskins as opposed to fake actors, such as Roger Rabbit himself.

Animated Short Film
Animation refers to the process in which each frame of a film or movie is produced individually, whether generated as a computer graphic, or by photographing a drawn image, or by repeatedly making small changes to a model (see claymation and stop motion), and then photographing the result. When the frames are strung together and the resulting film is viewed at a speed of 16 or more frames per second, there is an illusion of continuous movement (due to the persistence of vision). Generating such a film is very labour intensive and tedious, though the development of computer animation has greatly sped up the process.

Documentary Short Film
A broad category of cinematic expression, traditionally the only characteristic common to all documentary films is that they are meant to be factual. The French used the term to refer to any non-fiction film, including travelogues and instructional videos. The earliest "moving pictures" were by definition documentary. They were single shots, moments captured on film, whether of a train entering a station, a boat docking, or a factory of people getting off work. Early film (pre-1900) was dominated by the novelty of showing an event. These short films were called "actualities." Very little storytelling took place before the turn of the century, due mostly to technological limitations: cameras could hold only very small amounts of film; many of the first films are a minute or less in length.

With Robert J. Flaherty's Nanook of the North in 1922, documentary film embraced romanticism; Flaherty went on to film a number of heavily staged romantic films, usually showing how his subjects would have lived 100 years earlier and not how they lived right then (for instance, in Nanook of the North Flaherty does not allow his subjects to shoot a walrus with a nearby shotgun, but has them use a harpoon instead, putting themselves in considerable danger).

Some of Flaherty's staging, such as building a roofless igloo for interior shots, was done to accommodate the filming technology of the time. In later years, attempts to steer the action in this way, without informing the audience, have come to be considered both unethical and contradictory to the nature of documentary film. On the other hand, both the story line and content of any documentary are imposed by the filmmaker. In a notorious instance, for the Academy award winning documentary White Wilderness in 1958, Disney technicians built a snow-covered turntable to create the impression of madly leaping migrating lemmings and then herded the lemmings over a cliff into the sea. This fakery distorts the popular understanding of lemmings to this day. While lemmings do swarm in some years, they do not commit mass suicide.

The newsreel tradition is an important tradition in documentary film; newsreels were also sometimes staged but were usually reenactments of events that had already happened, not attempts to steer events as they were in the process of happening. For instance, much of the battle footage from the early 20th century was staged -- the cameramen would usually arrive on site after a major battle and reenact scenes to film them. Dziga Vertov was involved with the Russian Kino-Pravda newsreel series ("Kino-Pravda" means literally, "film-truth," a term that was later translated literally into the French cinema verite). Frank Capra's Why We Fight series was a newsreel series in the United States, commissioned by the government to convince the U.S. public that it was time to go to war.

The continental, or realist, tradition focused on man within man-made environments, and included the so-called "city symphony" films such as Berlin, Symphony of a City, Rien Que Les Heurs, and Man with the Movie Camera. These films tended to feature people as products of their environment, and leaned towards the impersonal or avant-garde.

The propagandist tradition consisted of films made with the explicit purpose of persuading an audience of a point. One of the most notorious propaganda films is Leni Riefenstahl's film Triumph of the Will. Why We Fight was explicitly contracted as a propaganda newsreel series in response to this, covering different aspects of World War II, and had the daunting task of persuading the United States public to go to war. The series has been selected for preservation in the United States' National Film Registry.

In the 1930s, documentarian and film critic John Grierson argued in his essay First Principles of Documentary that Robert Flaherty's film Moana had "documentary value," and put forward a number of principles of documentary. These principles were that cinema's potential for observing life could be exploited in a new art form; that the "original" actor and "original" scene are better guides than their fiction counterparts to interpreting the modern world; and that materials "thus taken from the raw" can be more real than the acted article. In this regard, Grierson's views align with Dziga Vertov's contempt for dramatic fiction as "bourgeois excess," though with considerably more subtlety. Grierson's definition of documentary as "creative treatment of actuality" has gained some acceptance, though it presents philosophical questions about documentaries containing stagings and reenactments.

In his essays, Vertov argued for presenting "life as it is" (that is, life filmed surreptitiously) and "life caught unawares" (life provoked or surprised by the camera). Cinema verite borrows from both Italian neorealism's penchant for shooting non-actors on location, and the French New Wave's use of largely unscripted action and improvised dialogue; the filmmakers took advantage of advances in technology allowing smaller, handheld cameras and synchronized sound to film events on location as they unfold. The films Harlan County, U.S.A. (directed by Barbara Kopple), Don't Look Back (D. A. Pennebaker), Lonely Boy (Wolf Koenig and Roman Kroitor) and Chronicle of a Summer (Jean Rouch) are all considered cinema verite. The genre has different names in different countries; "cinema verite" is perhaps the most common now, but in the United Kingdom the same movement was called "free cinema" and in the United States, "direct cinema." The directors of the movement also take different viewpoints on their degree of involvement, Kopple and Pennebaker, for instance, choosing non-involvement, and Rouch, Koenig, and Kroitor favoring direct involvement or even provocation when they deem it necessary.

Another recent development in the field of documentary is the creation of compilation films: for instance, The Atomic Cafe is made entirely out of found footage which various agencies of the U.S. government made about the safety of nuclear radiation (e.g., telling troops at one point that it's safe to be irradiated as long as they keep their eyes and mouths shut). Meanwhile The Last Cigarette combines the testimony of various tobacco company executives before the U.S. Congress with archival propaganda extolling the virtues of smoking.

Modern documentaries have a substantial overlap with other forms of television, with the development of so-called reality television that occasionally verges on the documentary but more often veers to the fictional.

Box office analysts have noted that this film genre has become increasingly successful in theatrical release with films like Bowling for Columbine, Super Size Me and especially Fahrenheit 9/11 being the primary examples. It is speculated that this trend could be further encouraged by the major film companies considering that compared to dramatic narrative films, documentaries typically have far lower budgets which can make even limited theatrical releases highly profitable.