I don’t like most shorts I’ve seen, I haven’t liked pretty much any short film idea I’ve ever come up with, and I don’t really think there’s much to be gained out of a short outside better technical skill. Feel free to disagree with me wholesale or on any individual point.

For ideas I’ve come up with personally, they tend to suffer from what most short films suffer from. There is no story, no beginning, middle and end. Most either hinge on an idea or feel like a scene of something larger. The idea ones can be visually interesting, technical achievements as it were, and if that’s the goal they can succeed. With that though a part of me wants the filmmaker to own it and just say ‘we had a cool idea and wanted to play with the camera’. More often than not they don’t and spin a tale where there’s an arc and story that supposed to hold some emotional resonance. Shorts that succeed in giving the audience a complete story in 8 or 12 minutes are fan-fucking-tastic, but those are few and very far between. It’s hard to build something in a short span of time that will allow an audience to invest in a character so that when the climax comes, in like 5 minutes, you’ll care about the outcome. It’s much easier to do something and have the viewer think ‘well that was pretty’, and move on.

I’ve only written 1 short that I ever cared about doing; still might at some point. It’s not a flashy visual idea, it’s a small day in the life idea. It’s a quirky little idea which plays out over a day for the characters and about 10 minutes for the audience. There’s no real character growth, no epiphany for the audience, just something to watch that would make them smile when the film fades out.

I’m not saying folks who want to shouldn’t make shorts, I’m just saying I don’t really care to. Thus I have an idea for a feature film and I want to put my efforts into doing that.