If you’re an early career filmmaker, you may have thought about making a feature. Maybe you’ve been inspired by the wondrous recent success of local Edmonton filmmaker Kyle Edward Ball and his debut feature Skinamarink. You too might have a few strong short films under your belt, and are thinking about making that leap. Then let’s talk about what it takes.
The first thing to know is that short films are an excellent training ground. Making shorts is the perfect way to hone your skills. You are likely to make a short by yourself or with a small crew, so you are forced to understand every role, process, trick, and operation. Making shorts teaches you the workflow of film production. You learn the necessities of pre-production, writing, storyboarding, and planning. You learn production skills: lighting, directing, blocking, etc. And shorts teach you that editing and post-production is really when the disparate appendages of shots and ideas finally cohere into the body of a film. These are all essential things to know when making a feature.
You should not, however, think of short films as a launchpad. There is a common misconception that having one of your short films “noticed” will secure your spot as director or writer on a feature length project. It is a very rare thing for this to happen — to the point of unreliability. As a rule of thumb, think about Isaac Newton’s first law of physics: “an object in motion remains in motion at constant speed and in a straight line, unless acted on by an unbalanced force.” As a filmmaker, if you are making short films, then you will most likely continue to make short films. Making a feature film requires a different course of action. You have to initiate an unbalanced force, one that will catapult you toward the feature. The leap from shorts to a feature is called a leap for a reason.
So what do you need to know before taking this leap?
Shorts and features require different types of ideas. This is one of the first things to know about making that jump. What do I mean by that? Well, a story that works well in short form often does not work so well when blown up to a feature length story. I was talking to Joshua Roach the other day (the writer behind another recent Edmonton-made feature film The Last Video Store) who said that what makes for a good short film does not necessarily make for a good feature — and vice versa. Having also made dozens of shorts, Roach said that short films are more about a good idea. Given how little time you have in a short, it is much easier to make something memorable and compelling through the use of an interesting concept, a funny occurrence, or a menacing moment, whereas a feature is more about story and character. What usually makes a feature length film enticing and re-watchable is the complexity of the emotional network at play between the characters. So when writing for a feature, think about the specific ways of retaining your audience’s interest. Why should they spend two hours of their time in your creative hands, rather than just five minutes?
Another important thing is to be realistic. Your first feature will likely be low budget; it should be, that’s okay. But those limitations do not have to be a burden. There are many creative ways you can write a story to make it more suitable for a smaller production.
Start big and then refine. That is Roach’s advice when writing for a feature. Write the best, most expensive version of the story with no concern for budget. When you re-write, go back and find out what the essence of a given scene or idea is. Figure out how you might be able to retain that essential idea, while making it cheaper to shoot. If you do that for every scene, you’ll end up with not only a distilled script that is more compelling but one that is also a bit easier to actually shoot.
So go out and make a feature, take the leap. Get a team, work on a big idea, and just see how you can make it work. It might suck, it might fail, but the more you try to make a feature, the sooner you’re going to get to a good one. That’s how Newton’s first law of physics goes: a director who is striving to make a feature film will continue to do so until it’s done!