The Science of Screenwriting by Paul Joseph Gulino & Connie Shears

Author:Paul Joseph Gulino & Connie Shears
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

The Challenge of Short Films

One form of filmmaking impacted by the high cost of audience attention is the short film. The short—five to thirty-five or so minutes—is the standard focus of film production at film schools the world over. It is, however, an archaic form. Initially, all films were shorts. From the 1890s to the 1910s, the stand-alone short film—a few minutes to eight or ten minutes in length—dominated cinema. In the 1910s, though, Hollywood film production diverged in two directions—the full-length feature film and the serial—what we now call a series. These two forms remain standard a hundred years later.

One would think that with distribution channels now available on the Internet, short films would make a comeback, but this is not the case: feature films and series dominate the Internet, too. Given so many possibilities available for viewing, why have the Hollywood models of the 1910s persisted, while the short film has not?

One clue lies in the relative cost of attention demanded by the exposition in the early part of a film, compared to the emotional payoff the film delivers. In a feature film of 120 minutes, the first thirty or so—corresponding to the “First Act” or setup—are the most cognitively demanding, since the audience must pay attention in order to absorb the who, what, when, where, and why of the story. Once the energy has been expended, though, the rest of the film—three-quarters of it—is free to deliver its emotional payload with relatively fewer cognitive demands. For example, once we invest our energy into learning who the characters are in The Hangover (2009), their relationships, what’s going on in their lives, why they are in Las Vegas, and find them in the predicament of waking up after a night of partying confronted by a series of mysteries—not the least of which is the whereabouts of the bridegroom—we can proceed to enjoy the emotional payoff that results for the rest of the film with relatively few cognitive demands placed on us.

In contrast, anyone who has attended a film festival to view an evening of short films recognizes how exhausting the experience can be. The viewer of the short film must withstand the cognitive demands of exposition repeatedly throughout the evening, with proportionately little emotional payoff. By its very nature—being short—the short film can never compete with the feature because of these meager returns on investment of emotional energy.

For television series, the ratio of time spent expending energy on exposition to time spent reaping the emotional rewards is even more lopsided. Once we have gotten to know Jerry, Elaine, George, Kramer, and their basic circumstances in Seinfeld, the series can run for almost a decade with few cognitive demands placed on us.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.