What I Learned Watching 3,000 Short Films!
Download MP3Well, I remember sitting in the screening room, and this was maybe like twenty years ago now. And again, like I've said, when you're looking at these films, you're really hoping they're going to be great. And you're looking for those best films from whatever year it is that you're looking at them in. And I remember this one particular film. And it starts, it just starts with a bang.
Bob Degus:And you see this woman, you see her in her bare feet, and she's going down these stairs as fast as she can go. And you immediately see that she's carrying a very young baby who doesn't have a diaper on, and she has three children with her, and they're rushing out of this apartment complex. And they storm across the street to an area that's a little more slightly more upscale than where they were living. And this woman with these four kids pounds on the door and another woman opens the door. And the first woman screams at the second woman, No one hits my kids.
Bob Degus:And the two adult women start this fist fight brawl, they're on the ground fighting, fighting each other. And then the children are screaming, She hit me first! She hit me first! And eventually, this fight calms down. And we learn from the second, upscale woman that they don't like this woman, and they don't think she's a very good mother, and that they think she should have her kids taken away from her.
Bob Degus:And so the first woman heads back to her house. And as she's going back to her house with the kids, we see an ex or not an ex, but an old boyfriend from Hollywood not from Hollywood an old boyfriend from high school pulls up in the car, and he hasn't seen her for a number of years. And he wonders if they want to go on a date. And she's really excited about this idea of going on a date. And he asks her about, Oh, who are those kids?
Bob Degus:And she lies. She said, Oh, I'm just babysitting for them. They're not mine. And he says, Okay, cool. Well, I'll see you this afternoon.
Bob Degus:And that's the opening of this film. It's about a minute and a half of the film, and you are hooked from the moment this starts. And what's so powerful about it is because this woman who's clearly very poor because she's running out of her house in a nightgown and she's defending her children, she says, No one hits my kids. And so you have this immediate sympathy for her. And then you have all this other information coming that the neighbors think she's not a good mother, and then that she's lying that these aren't her kids, and you're captivated.
Bob Degus:The short film was called Wasp. It was directed by Andrea Arnold. And I think it's probably to this day still the best short film, or at least in the top five that I've ever seen. And it was just electrifying. And one of the things I love so much about WASP is as you watch these films as an Oscar voter, you might see it once in the first initial screening, but then you have to see it on the shortlist, and then you have to see it again when you're voting on the five nominees.
Bob Degus:And I've probably seen WASP easily 20 times, and it just gets better and better each time you see it. And there's so many things about it that worked just so well. And it did go on that year, not only to be nominated, but to win the Oscar. After forty years in Hollywood and watching more than 3,000 short films as an Oscar voter, I know what separates a good short film from one that wins awards. My name is Bob Degus.
Bob Degus:This is the Hollywood Film Coach Podcast where we'll help you create award winning short films. Episode two, What I Learned Watching 3,000 Short Films. So welcome back to this episode of the Hollywood Film Coach Podcast. In the last episode, I talked much more about myself, my background, where I came from. In this episode, we're really going to shift focus to what this journey of looking at 3,000 short films has taught me and how you can apply that directly to your work.
Bob Degus:And one of the things that I think is going to be most helpful and most important for you is it's really important for you to watch short films. I can talk about them. I can give my opinions about them. But really, what's going to be the most helpful is for you to watch them and for you to form your own opinions. Because just because I think one thing doesn't mean you might think something different.
Bob Degus:So it's really important to watch short films. And one of the things that I'm going to be doing is there is a companion substack piece that goes along with this podcast. So you can, with each episode, it will have its own standalone substack that you can look at, read, and get additional information beyond what is in the podcast. Specifically, and most important in those substack pieces, I'm going to include links for you to find the films that I'm talking about. Some of them are a little bit hard to find.
Bob Degus:I'm going to do my very best efforts to find the most official, most reliable sources for these films. I encourage you to support them. Some of them, it's like $2 or $3 to rent them or buy them. And hopefully that money goes to the filmmakers themselves. If I can't find those or if they don't exist, then I will be referencing YouTube links.
Bob Degus:And like I said, I think it's really important for you to be able to look at the films, see them. Hopefully, the things I'm saying and pointing out, you will see them in the films. And then you will also be able to take that into your own work. So let's get started. So I first want to talk to you about literally what looking at 3,000 short films, how that's impacted me.
Bob Degus:And I've actually seen way more total films than that, but specifically short films. It's well over 3,000 at this point. And one of the things that I've learned and seen is these patterns that you just start to see them repeated. And if you think about cinema as a language that we all speak, it's this universal language that we are all well versed in. We see movies, we see television, we see YouTube videos, and there is a language that both comes up visually and with the sound that we're very used to, and we all speak quite fluently.
Bob Degus:And part of studying film is actually looking at what that grammar of filmmaking is and why a certain film might make you feel one way over a different film or why a certain shot sequence works in one film. And maybe that wouldn't have worked in another film. And so for me, watching these short films over so many years really, boy, like just underline certain things that were very successful and certain other things that filmmakers would do that would just be frustrating. And it's especially frustrating as a voter as you're looking at these films because you're committing your time to watch them. And then you just see filmmakers that are lost, and that they're trying to do something really good, but it just doesn't work.
Bob Degus:And they probably don't understand why it doesn't work. So the idea of this podcast is to try to articulate those things in this particular episode to really look at what, just right out of the gate, what are the big 10 patterns that I've observed after watching 3,000 short films? And that's what we're going to do next. So let's start by looking at the big patterns. What are the four or five universal things that I've seen across all these 3,000 short films that are so really critical for you as a filmmaker to be thinking about your work, whether you're writing something or about to shoot it or in the middle of editing.
Bob Degus:And the first one is that they earn every minute of their runtime. And that's something that's really critical, especially in a short film. I mean, it's critical in features, but it's especially critical in a short film because they're short. And you want each second of the film to be communicating a tremendous amount to the audience. So if you think about the film Wasp that I talked about at the beginning of this episode, within the first twenty seconds, you know so much about the main character and you care immediately, deeply for her.
Bob Degus:You know right away that she's poor. You know right away that she's a single mother. She's barefoot. She's in a poor section of the neighborhood compared to the slightly more upscale section. It's a tremendous amount that's told both visually and through sound immediately.
Bob Degus:You don't have to spend $3.04, 5 minutes on an opening title sequence that tells you some things but isn't really efficient. And the running time issue is a giant thing with short films because often there'll be years, especially when we've gotten down to where we're looking to take the group of 10 shortlisted films and pick five, where there will be, gosh, there's eight films that should be nominated, you know? And you have to pick five of those great eight films. And that's, for me, where I start looking at how efficiently are the films delivering on their promise within the amount of time that they are using to tell the story. So that's the first one.
Bob Degus:The second one is that they have a really clear emotional destination. And they're really about one thing, not two, not three. In a feature, you have much more time to develop and explore the main theme and then sub supporting themes. That's really hard to do in a short film. And what you end up doing if you're trying to explore multiple themes in a short film, in a short period of time, is that you don't completely land them all and it doesn't work.
Bob Degus:So the idea is to pick one emotional destination, one place that you're taking your audience from here and you're taking them to there. And that you as the director and the writer are very clear about that journey that you want the audience to go on. And so that's a critical thing. Other item three, I guess, would be this. The first ninety seconds of a short film are perhaps the most important.
Bob Degus:So if you think about it from a voting perspective, where you're watching a series of films back to back, is that you sit down and you're going to make a judgment about the film in the first ninety seconds. And you're going to ask yourself, Do I trust this director? Do I feel I'm in good hands? Do I feel the director knows what they're doing and are taking me on an interesting journey? And I want to reference WASP again here because you're immediately catapulted in the middle of this situation with this woman coming out of her apartment down these stairs.
Bob Degus:You don't know what's happening, but you're curious to see where it's going. She goes across the street. She pounds on the door, right? And she says her first line, which is something like, No one hits my kids. And then the two women do something completely unexpected.
Bob Degus:The two adult women are in a fist fight like children on the ground fighting and punching each other. And you know you're in the hands of a very accomplished, talented, visionary director. And so once you make that decision at the beginning of the film, you're going to then be able to be much more comfortable going on the journey of the film and going where the director wants to take you. If it's the opposite of that, where the beginning is unfocused or long or slow, that's going to change your opinion. And for me personally, I often decide the final score in the first minute and a half of the movie and then spend the rest of the movie proving that that's the correct score.
Bob Degus:And so the beginning of the movie is very, very important. The fourth thing would be that the films and the directors trust their audience. They don't overexplain. They don't underexplain. They have a real clear sense of who the audience is that they're making the film for.
Bob Degus:And they are using their filmmaking skills to speak to that audience. And that's really an incredibly important thing that we'll talk about in a later episode, but understanding who your audience is and then making the film for them. So if you think about making a short film for a group of eight year old children versus making a short film for adult Oscar voters. Those are two different audiences and require two different sets of filmmaking skills. So really trusting your audience and making sure that you're doing the best job to tell that audience the story.
Bob Degus:And finally, of the common things that I've seen across all great short films is that they really have a point of view. And by point of view, I mean that they have a unique point of view from that director that that director is trying to communicate to the specific audience. And that's such a critical thing because that's what engages an audience. That's what engages a voter. That's what makes the film really interesting, where you're seeing a different perspective maybe than you might have.
Bob Degus:For instance, using WASP again. I could have directed a very good version of WASP. It would have been very serviceable, very fine. I would have done a good job with it. But it wouldn't have been unique, and it wouldn't have had Andrea Arnold's really brilliant point of view on the place where it's set, which is The UK, and the characters in it that were clearly based on things that she had observed growing up in her life.
Bob Degus:So the film and the filmmaker really has a point of view about what they're trying to communicate. And it's not generic, and it's not middle of the road. It's very specific. It doesn't have to be extreme and strange. It could be.
Bob Degus:But it's specific and not soft and middle of the road. So next, let's look at four or five things that the Forgettable films all have in common. And this actually is much more fun for me because I think you can really learn much more from stuff that doesn't work. Many, many years ago, I was really interested in teaching myself how to screenwrite and write, and I decided my favorite writer was Tennessee Williams. And I read all of Tennessee Williams' plays, from the first ones he wrote to the last ones, and I read them in order because I was trying to figure out why Streetcar Named Desire was such a great play.
Bob Degus:And I never quite figured that out. But I did figure out in his bad plays, in the ones that didn't work, you could see what he was doing and what tricks he was using, what magic tricks he was using, and you could see the sleight of hand. And that pointed to why something like Streetcar Named Desire or Glass Menagerie are so great. And so I think in the same way in cinema, as you're looking at films that don't work, you can really, in many ways, learn a tremendous amount, maybe even more than the the brilliant films. So the the first biggest pet peeve or biggest thing that exists every year is this idea of the imitation film.
Bob Degus:Don't do it unless you're going to do it so brilliantly that it's stunning. Because there was a period of time, I remember, that every year there would be the rip off of Raiders of the Lost Ark. And it was a short film that was trying to be like Raiders of the Lost Ark, and it had an Indiana Jones character. And the problem with those films that are imitating other films is they immediately call up the film that they're imitating. So now I have in my mind Raiders of the Lost Ark, and I have Harrison Ford in my mind, and I have all that.
Bob Degus:And then I'm looking at your film that's a send up or a rip off of it, and it's just not going to compare, and it's not going to be as good, and it isn't going to be original. And so that's something I really, really would avoid. The second thing is this idea of concept over character. We relate to characters. We relate to people who are like us or who we think we are like or who might be interested in exploring their journey, characters that we can identify with.
Bob Degus:If you have a film that is more concept over character, then you have something that maybe lacks soul. And there's often there was again, this was another period of time where think it was BMW, but they were making these short films for theaters that were very slick. And they clearly had million dollar budgets. But the problem was that the main character kind of was the car. And so you would look at those films, and although they were impressive in how they were shot and how they were lit and how they were edited and the music and the production design, they ultimately left you lacking for something more.
Bob Degus:So that would be a big one. And that also is the second idea where technical ambition outpaces storytelling, which is the same sort of thing but from another perspective, where the technology or the technique is so advanced and the storytelling is weak. Films generally, unless it's an experimental film, are stories and are a way for one person or a group of people to communicate with another group of people. And if it's all about the technology and the techniques that were used and less about the story, that's also not going to be effective for you. I mentioned in the other section talking about how important the beginning of the movie is.
Bob Degus:And so the equal thing to this and why a lot of films fail and don't work is the ending, in that they have an unearned ending. And if you think about the journey of a film as a plane taking off, taking you on this journey, and then landing, the unearned ending is an ending that that either suddenly comes out of the blue or shocks you or just doesn't fit with everything that's come before it. And that's a case a lot of times where someone has a story that they're trying to tell that's too long for the short film format. And so they cut out a bunch of stuff and just have this ending that leaves you like, wait, what just happened? So the ending is really critical that it follows from everything else that's come before it.
Bob Degus:And that's something that a lot of short films, especially short films that you're rooting for, that are actually the first half of them is good, suddenly the ending just leaves you like, Wait, what happened? So you really almost want to make sure that you are certain of what your ending is and that everything leading up to it follows that. And again, like I just said in the last thing, it's too much story for the runtime. And so then you start skimming, right? Because if you're trying to tell a story that should be told in ninety minutes or two hours, and you're trying to tell it in twenty minutes, you're going to have to highlight and just tell certain things.
Bob Degus:And that isn't effective. If you think of the movie Whiplash, there was a short film Whiplash. And the short film Whiplash did not try to tell the entire story that the feature film Whiplash did. Instead, it told a small section, a small, very powerful scene from the larger film. It functioned as a short film very effectively.
Bob Degus:And but the feature film has a tremendous amount more story. So you really wanna make sure that the story is equal to the running time that you're trying to tell. You know, one of the most surprising things that watching 3,000 short films has taught me is this idea that anyone can make a short film and win an Oscar. If you think about most of the other Oscar categories, best picture, best actor, best director, best actress, they have huge marketing budgets behind those awards. There's billboards, there's screenings, there's all kinds of money spent for the films to receive those awards or to be voted on with the Oscars.
Bob Degus:But the short film category to me is interesting, and it's kind of almost pure cinema in a way, because there aren't big advertising budgets to vote for this short film and not that short film. It's really a very pure thing where filmmakers are looking at other filmmakers' work and ranking them. And one of the most surprising things to me was a film called God of Love that won the Oscar a number of years ago. And what's so extraordinary about God of Love is that it was made by a group of college students, and it went on to be considered for the Student Academy Awards, and then it won in the Student Academy Awards, which made it eligible for the Oscars. It went on in the main Oscars to get nominated.
Bob Degus:And then that year, it won Best Picture as a short film. And the film is, again, like WASP, just this extraordinary work of filmmaking and how efficient it is. And basically, the main character of the film is this guy, and he has a crush on a girl in his band. And he prays to God that God helped him win her love. And after the band finishes the set, this strange package arrives, and it's a group of darts.
Bob Degus:And there's a note in there that says anyone who gets stuck with this dart will fall in love with someone for six hours. And so this sets up the movie, which is him trying to get this girl to fall in love with him. And she's actually in love with someone else who's in the band who doesn't see her, isn't interested in her, and you have this love triangle going on. But the film is extraordinarily great in its efficiency and how it uses the existing elements that these student filmmakers had at their disposal to make an extraordinarily engaging, fun story that went on to win a tremendous number of awards. And that really taught me that anyone who is inspired to and who wants to put the work in can make a short film that has a real chance at being considered for an Oscar.
Bob Degus:And that was a really big eye opening moment for me about how powerful this specific short film category is in the Oscars. So what does all this mean for your film? Well, really, it's asking yourself a series of questions. Does every minute in my film earn its place? So you can apply that to your script that you're writing or that you're writing with your writer.
Bob Degus:Is every beat in the script, every moment in the script earning its place? That's a key thing. When you're editing your film, is every moment earning its place? Because maybe what worked in the script, when it gets shot, there's a way to be more efficient. So how do you make your short film as short as it can be and still tell the story without becoming too short, which is the other side to go?
Bob Degus:Do you know clearly and specifically what you want to communicate to your audience? That's a really key thing. Do you know what it is you're trying to say? And then you're making sure that everything you say, every shot, every piece of dialogue, every piece of action is contributing to that message that you want to tell your audience members. And then really look at the first ninety seconds of your script and of your film.
Bob Degus:Are they as tight and focused as they can be that engages an audience and gets their attention to go, Oh, hey, what's this? Like WASP, where right away you're wondering what's going to happen to this woman. She's in a fist fight with her neighbor. Where is this going to go? And then her an old boyfriend from high school shows up, and you're wondering, are they going to get together and what's going to happen with these kids?
Bob Degus:So you really want the first ninety seconds to be absolutely brilliant. You want to think about, are you trusting your audience? And again, that comes to understanding who you're making a film for. And this was an issue for me that was very hard for a long time to understand, like, well, my film, the audience is everyone. But it isn't.
Bob Degus:There's specific people who are going to respond to the film you're making and other people who aren't going to be interested in it at all. And the more clear you can get as to who your audience is, why you're making this film for that audience, then you're much more focused in the decisions you make to help communicate that idea with your audience? And then what's the specific point of view that you specifically want to be telling the world? Not the general point of view, but you specifically. What is your voice and how is your voice going to be communicated through making that film that's different than 10 other people who could tell the same story.
Bob Degus:And that's when you have a really unique film. One more thing. If today's episode sparked something for you, head over to hollywoodfilmcoach.substack.com for the companion piece. It's original writing that goes deeper into the most important idea from today's episode and includes links to every film we've talked about so you can watch them yourself and form your own conclusions. The gap between a good short film and a great one that wins awards is smaller than you think.
Bob Degus:I'm Bob Degus. This is the Hollywood Film Coach Podcast. Be sure to subscribe, follow us and check out the next episode. Join me in episode three, where I explore the number one mistake that kills most short films.
