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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

To twist or not to twist

alexwhitmer said:
Case in point. This came in today ...

I'd love to shoot something 1-3 pages,....and with a twist.
Click to expand...

1-3 pages...hmmm...let's not...and just say we did...

Ahh..confusion..seriously what is their intention in
shooting something only 1-3 pages ???
 
Steve Das said:
1-3 pages...hmmm...let's not...and just say we did...

Ahh..confusion..seriously what is their intention in
shooting something only 1-3 pages ???
Click to expand...

Make something short enough to actually get programmed in a festival if it's good?

It's really hard to write short. If they can pull it off more power to them. It's a valued skill in the advertising (advertainment) world. What I typically get handed is 25 page scripts. Shooting a 25 page project is a much bigger mistake than shooting a 1 pager. Too long to get programmed. Too short to sell as a feature but nearly all the work of a feature if done right.

In fact, I'm a big fan of newbies shooting ONE DAY only and then taking that project all through post. Most people fail in a lot of ways they never forsee on their early projects. Better to learn on smaller projects before moving up to longer ones IMHO.
 
Joel Kaye said:
Shooting a 25 page project is a much bigger mistake than shooting a 1 pager. Too long to get programmed. Too short to sell as a feature but nearly all the work of a feature if done right.
Click to expand...

I agree. And I'm speaking from experience. :D

When you're done shooting a 25 minute film you might as well have just shot a feature. The only difference is that you would have spent maybe twice as many days at each location but so much of it is already in prep/pre-light/tear down that the energy spent on shooting would have been a lot higher.
 
Joel Kaye said:
Shooting a 25 page project is a much bigger mistake than shooting a 1 pager. Too long to get programmed.
Click to expand...

Is that true?! I really don't have any experience with festivals... however I always thought that a 20 or 25 minute short falls into the runtime for shorts accepted for most festivals. I've written 3 shorts, all around 25 pages, and hope to start shooting the first one in a few months. Am I going to have an impossible time getting into festivals at that runtime, regardless of quality?
 
Many shorts festivals have a 15 minute length limit, credit roll, everything, all in.
What everyone else is saying here is that experience has taught that shorts closer to 10 seem to get programed more often.
 
Omar Saad said:
Is that true?! I really don't have any experience with festivals... however I always thought that a 20 or 25 minute short falls into the runtime for shorts accepted for most festivals. I've written 3 shorts, all around 25 pages, and hope to start shooting the first one in a few months. Am I going to have an impossible time getting into festivals at that runtime, regardless of quality?
Click to expand...

Film Festivals are a business. Your story will be as long as it needs to be. But think about it this way: if you could sell 40 tickets per hour or 2 tickets per hour which would you choose, from a business standpoint? And from the other side... would you rather take a chance on wasting 25 minutes of your life on crap or 5 minutes?

Time is a commitment and it costs money. Nobody wins.
 
There are one-minute festivals as well. Making a good, one-minute film is not easy by any means.

Agree on the run time. Doorpost has a 7 minute limit, including credits. I think 15 minutes is the outside limit if one intends to run the fest circuit. Beyond that, venues shrink pretty quickly. 10, it seems, is optimum.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks in going from script to finished film is page length. In short film, the one page = one minute just doesn't hold up, and we see some painful editing to make a 6 page script into a 6 minute film, including title and credits. In the end the story suffers due to the needed hack job. I have found this to be especially true of dialogue-loaded scripts, and not even a good twist can save them.

4 pages is about what I aim for to get a solid 6 minute film. The editing process always starts on paper - or should at least.
 
alexwhitmer said:
There are one-minute festivals as well. Making a good, one-minute film is not easy by any means.
Click to expand...

A good one-minute film..easy..? ..actually..seems kind of impossible...

Any links to some of these one-minute masterpieces ? :emote_popcorn:
 
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