1. Making short films gives you the practical experience on the set you need to become a successful director. Every time you make a short you become more confident in yourself and your abilities and this business is all about confidence.
2. You practice your storytelling techniques. Storytelling is not only about technical abilities or scriptwriting. Storytelling is a combination of a lot of different creative departments working together and led by your vision. To have people follow your vision, you need to become a leader, and there is no better way than practise your abilities on the set.
3. Working with limited time and resource helps to dig into the creative side most filmmakers don’t fully realise they have.
4. Having limited resources helps to find unusual creative solutions.
5. Short films shouldn’t take you years to edit and distribute; and if it does, something is seriously wrong. If you don’t like what you made, you can move on to another film, another story and start from scratch, armed with the knowledge you gained from previous experience.
6. Making short films is not as exhausting as making feature films on limited budgets. To stick with finishing a feature film when there is no budget left to cover post-production costs is very challenging, to put it mildly.
7. Film festivals fees for short films are way lower than feature films. You can send your film to many more festivals, which will give you higher chances of being picked up by any (or many) of them.
8. Short films are usually not directed by stars or with movie stars in them (sometimes it happens, but it is rather an exception, not a rule), which means that your odds of being selected to a film festival are higher with a short without stars attached than with a feature without stars attached.
9. Short films are fun. You can make different films using different filmmaking styles or aesthetics. You can experiment to find your voice. To make a feature film costs a lot of money, (production, post-production and distribution) and it is not easy to make the budget back, not to mention to make the profit for your investors. The whole process can get pretty stressful especially when nothing is going according to your plan.
10. There is not as much pressure to make money back with short films as it is with features.
11. Every time you make a short, you grow as a director; you deepen your knowledge, and your abilities and your confidence expand and in this business, it is all about confidence.
To me, filmmaking is all about constant growth and not staying in one spot for too long. So pick up your camera and start making films, nothing is stopping you now.
Leave a Reply