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Shorts go
a long way.
by Massimo Amici |
265 shorts from more than 30 countries vied for screen time at this year's CFC Canadian Worldwide Short Film Festival. Though the CFC is a major league shorts festival (the second largest in the world), it was the lively market, featuring buyers from around the globe, that stole the show from the numerous public screenings of the five-day Toronto festival. Over 400 shorts were broadcast or picked up for distribution from the market in the 2006 edition alone.
Short filmmakers and other industry professionals also came together for the Short Films BIG IDEAS Symposium, a series of industry workshops on market-related topics - from film insurance to which short films sell, from grant-writing to moving up from shorts to features - that reached out to the commercial soul in filmmakers.
Until recently, independent short filmmaking was a kind of unbound artistic expression. Few counted on making a significant amount of money with their short films. The raison-d'être for a short film was simply an opportunity for a young director to learn their craft and build their reel.
Festival success was somewhat linked to the possibility of directing a feature in the mind of the director. But now, with phenomena such as VoD and the vast amounts of new and emerging platforms and vehicles, the demand for content has surpassed what short filmmakers themselves would have hoped for. How will this demand change short films and their authors?
An aspiring feature film director can learn to apply his short-filmmaking talent and earn some cash, perhaps even making a living. This may be a reality, only several years away. What will this do to short form in film? It will definitely make filmmakers themselves more market-focussed.
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Eileen Arandiga - Festival Director |
Though, today, a short filmmaker often writes and produces a short film to express some intimate feeling or show the big guys he/she can do in short what they achieve in feature-length, tomorrow’s short filmmakers will be more conscious of where their shorts will end up after the festival circuit. They’ll start thinking like real producers.
Inevitably, this will take some of the art out of their films, replacing it's basic feel with strategic thinking. This may sound harsh, but is a somewhat necessary step towards finding true inner expression. I'll explain further. If a filmmaker knows he can earn a certain amount of money with the films he produces, ultimately he’ll include that business aspect into his gamma of filmmaking skills automatically. Once this is done, the director will then be able to concentrate on the original impulses that made them want to be a director in the first place (untainted by forced strategic marketing thinking), resulting in better, more marketable, films.
This yields a marketable short film that remains artistic expression. A combination, we can all easily imagine, that will result in much more success than the filmmaker may expect. This movement towards being a "commercial-savvy artist" is exactly what the world needs.
Money should be considered a side effect of art. A good side effect that may actually even contribute to the art. But perhaps that’s another article...
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