Codes and Conventions of Short Film

I have watched around 30 short films by now, and it would be a good idea to summarize my points that I have picked up into one area so that I can relate back to them wile producing my short film. I will try keep my summary short and sweet, and give examples when necessary.

I have found wile watching short films that there is mainly just one or two characters in the film, and there will most likely be a central protagonist who will remain centre frame throughout the film. Most of the short films I watched only had the one character focused on, for example This Is Me, where the central protagonist was the male in a hospital bed. He always remained centre frame, and there were only two other characters in the film, his wife and the boy with the plane.

A second point I found when watching short films, is that they all have a twist to the storyline, this is most likely because the films are so short, that without a twist in the story, it would simply not be interesting. 

A third point I realised wile watching short films is that quite a lot use the steadi-cam technology to create a point of view shot, this is because short films are mainly a story in a particular characters life, and the best way to betray this story is to see it how the character would see it.

Voice overs are a very popular method of sound in short films, and it is often found in short films that a voice over would be used instead of dialogue, there could be many reasons for this, for one it is cheaper to record a voice over than use a high tech boom, but also if the story is about someone's life, the voice over would normally be that of the central protagonist.

A good way of producing a story for a short film is to simply take a normal life situation and simply tweak one aspect of it to create a comical version to life, for example you could have everyone walking around wearing animal head masks, and acting as though it was normal.

A short film tends to be between one to five minutes long.

A last point I have found with short films is that most of them are low budget, and this can be noticed wile watching them, there are no expensive titles used, but instead the ususal white font, black background. It is also very noticeable that in quite a lot of short films actors tend to be quite young (age 16-24)