Initial Response

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The term short film, to me (and Wikipedia), means "an original motion picture that has a running time of 40 minutes or less, including all credits." Our task only calls for five-10 minutes or so of footage/ screenplay so the main problem will be constructing a concise and impactful narrative in this short amount of time. It is common for short films to fail to deliver on a good ending, which in my opinion is the most important part of any film, book or TV show. The script will need to be near perfect, I imagine dialogue will be minimal and it will mostly be a visually based film, at least in my case. Composing beautiful shots and getting perfect lighting, and telling a story with only these elements and music makes more sense to me with only five-ten minutes than a truly complicated, and possibly messy, script heavy piece. Unless movement is minimal and the script is concise, in which case I could be swayed (something similar to the milk scene at the beginning of Inglorious Basterds comes to mind immediately). I will need to conduct more research, watch other short films and come to terms with the genre as I am not so well-versed in it in order to begin coming up with ideas. Short films do tend to lend themselves to Romance, Tension and Horror as they are all strong emotions that can be instantly connected with and do not necessarily require thirty minutes of set up to understand. The story must be kept simple at all costs.

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