Too many people are still making short films.
Thirty years ago and earlier, short films were a semi-worthwhile thing to make. You could show them at festivals. They served as a calling card. They could teach you the craft of filmmaking.
The budget of most short films—even to this day—is in the $30,000 range. For that, you’ll need an investor.
This process takes months. Sometimes years.
Once you finish your short film, to distribute it you have to pay thousands of dollars to encoding houses, festivals, and distribution services, to say nothing of all the personal leg work you’ll have to do promoting your film.
So, you’re very likely to lose a lot of money—yours or your investor’s.
Now consider the competition for your short film: roughly a billion “short films” are uploaded to YouTube every second. They’re shot on phones in a day, for under $200.
Why would you want to compete with that?
The people uploading to YouTube (or TikTok—wherever) have the right idea. The only way to make a short film today is to make as many as you can, as cheaply as you can, make a lot of them, and upload them as quickly as you can.
That’s a faster and cheaper way to learn filmmaking.
If you’re hellbent on investing $30,000, make a feature film. You might still lose money, but a feature film is something you can sell. It’s something that counts. It’s a format people actually watch.
Get to it!
Thanks for listening, Scott. Yeah, that bothered me, too. The development is barely related to the premise.
re: being actionable, I wasn't even thinking about that. I knew a sci fi writer, Richard Matheson, a little bit. He wrote a story about a serial killer who would go through neighborhoods doing stuff that I won't mention here because this is a public forum. Turned out, somebody saw the story then did it. So, I get your point about not touching certain material for that reason.
On the other hand, there's black comedy, movies like Harold & Maude or Heathers...
Hi Scott,
I just wrote a sketch — it’s topical, about the Budweiser boycott, titled, “This Bud’s for You.”
The whole thing uses shock, but no sex, drugs, gross out or swearing.
It escalates, but it seems to me that it’s one-dimesional in that it uses shock humor and nothing else. It’s just one shock line after another.
I just posted it on my Substack and I’m wondering, if you get a chance to listen to it, what you think. It’s 3 minutes long. It’s HERE:
https://chasholloway.substack.com/p/this-buds-for-you
A related question: The great headline (which I think you wrote) on the cover of Our Dumb Century, “World’s Largetst Metaphor Hits Ice-Berg” — what funny filter would you say it uses? I know it’s parody because it’s in the form of a news headline, but there’s more to it than that. Wordplay? Analogy?