Short Films Three and Four

With James at Cannes and my sudden trip to London for an expected job interview done for the moment, I’ve suddenly got time to look at your short films. So here are my thoughts on films three and four.

What’s interesting about shorts three and four is they have a common flaw, one I find in a lot of short films. So it’s useful that they happened to come up for review together.

Short Three

“On The Death Of His Wife” is a semi-documentary style dramtisation of a man’s grief on the death of his wife. It shows both his life now and his life with her, whilst the narrative is carried by a poem. (It’s well known round here that I’m allergic to poetry, but I promise I didn’t let that sway me in my review).

The idea itself is sound and the subject matter interesting and this ought to be a moving film, but for me it isn’t. And, the reason I think it isn’t, is because there isn’t anything in the visual narrative that allows the audience to connect with the protagonist. We see him sleeping on the sofa and we assume this is because he can’t sleep in the bed he shared with his wife, but that in itself is not enough to give us a direct connection to his grief.

One of the things about creating a poignant moment for an audience that I’ve noticed, is it’s almost always created through the use of irony and internal conflict. If I think about the moment in Crash when the detective listens to his mother praising the dead brother for bringing her groceries, when we know it was actually the detective. It’s the irony of this which allows us to feel deeply for the detective; it’s his internal conflict between needing acknowledgment of his love for her and the loving sacrifice he makes by remaining silent, which make the moment so touching.

So, to get an audience to really feel the grief of this man, the narrative would have to tell the story of his grief, even if the poem was removed. And that’s the real problem with this short, and with many shorts, the real story doesn’t make it onto the screen. it’s not the actor’s fault, he’s got nothing to work with.

On a completely separate issue, the shooting style for the piece was a little clunky, simply because it mainly used a semi-documentary, “fly on the wall” approach, but every now and again an indie drama shot would sneak into the mix. So, it ended up looking like neither.

Short Four

“Middle Of Nowhere”

A couple on an all night road trip come across a body in the road, but when the guy gets out of the car he discovers the body is the woman he’s travelling with.

Hmm… I used to love the Twilight Zone and the isolated couple to whom weird shit happens is a classic set up for these kinds of short stories. However, there is a fine line between telling a story of unexplained weirdness and just plain confusion.

This film has definitely crossed the line; it just is confusing.

Again, the issue is that there isn’t anyway for the audience to connect with the protagonists. The couple pull up because there is a body in the road, the man gets out. Up to this point we’re OK. Then the woman sees someone run across the road behind her in her mirror and her immediate reaction to this is to get a gun from the glove compartment and chase him into the woods — why? Her motivation for acting this way is never clarified — from that point on it’s all downhill, from the point of view of understanding the characters. She’s trying to kill him, he’s trying to kill her and nothing in the plot gives the audience a chance to understand what it is that kicked the whole thing off.

I kept hoping that there would be an incredibly clever Twilight Zone pay off, which would give the audience the one piece of the puzzle that would allow them to go “Oh, so that’s what was going on.” In which case this could have been a really good short. I mean it looks OK, the acting’s not bad, but where I can see the actors really struggling is with why they’re doing the things they’re doing.

In both of these two films the protagonist’s emotional journey isn’t uncovered in the story and really it’s those journeys that the audience connect with. Both of them could have been great films, but aren’t because of that one factor.

Now, as you know, I’m not a fan of the short film form, but where writing short films does prepare you for writing features is it does give you the opportunity to learn how to take the audience on the protagonist’s inner journey. If you can make a short where the audience both understand and empathise with your protagonist, then you’re ready to start writing feature films. One of the reason’s I’m almost always disappointed by shorts is because that inner journey is almost never portrayed.

Now, yesterday I delivered the first short script I’ve written in five years to our local funding body for a short film scheme they’re running. James is going to direct it, if they go for it, but actually we might just make it anyway.

Of course as and when we make it we will of course post it. It’s only fair that you get the same shot at pointing out our mistakes as I’ve taken here. I may also publish the script for people to look at, but I want to run that past James the next time we speak.

Hope people got some good from what I’ve said here and that they also remember that I still think everyone who actually writes a script and makes a film is a winner in my eyes.

The other thing is, every mistake I’m pointing out is one I made myself in my own short films. I made a short film a called Momentum which was completely baffling! LOL.

These are all incredibly easy mistakes to make and all part of the learning curve of writing something and then seeing if you’ve managed to achieve what you set out to do.