What is a Short Film?By Rachael Sampson

Definition:

• A short film is any film not long enough to be considered a feature film. No consensus exists as to where that boundary is drawn: the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences defines a short film as “an original motion picture that has a running time of 40 minutes or less, including all credits”. The term featurette originally applied to a film longer than a short subject, but shorter than a standard feature film.

Popular short films (June 2014)

On the website IMDB, it says that the most popular short film globally is ‘Tangled Ever After’. What is the reason for it’s success? The running time for the film is 6 minutes so how can they create a popular film in such a short amount of time?Tangled Ever After is a sequel to the film Tangled, which proved to be very popular globally. It is a Disney musical which earned a total gross of $200,821,936 with a production budget of $260 million. The film is about a witch who takes a princess when she is a baby and uses her powers to keep her youthful. However the princess escapes from the castle and ends up going on an adventure and falls in love. The short film shows the wedding of the couple. Because of the feature film’s success, it meant that people wanted to see the wedding of their most beloved characters. Also because it was a musical, the film did well on that behalf as the songs are popular worldwide with lots of iTunes downloads therefore this attracts the audience to the short sequel because it is clear there will be more songs.

Popular Short Films (September 2014)

It is clear to see that the most popular short films are follow ups of popular films which have an average running time of 2 hours. Knowing this, it tells us that people are willing to invest in something when they know they story outline and plot through a different source. This suggests that it could be a good idea to re-tell a story through a different perspective or twist and manipulate a tale which our audience will already be familiar with. Examples of this are shown in films such as 10 Things I Hate About You (twist on The Taming Of The Shrew – William Shakespeare) and spoofs such as Scary Movie and Vampires Suck, as people already know the storyline, so they are willing to invest time into seeing something related to the story they enjoyed.