Duration of short film Visual communication

1. Duration
The duration of the filmcan be a maximum of three minutes, this is a very limited time
frame to tell and entire story, although it can be done, after looking at several online short
films, I have looked at the timings of them, and when the introduction usually stops, and
how long the climax of the story is and when a problem is found, I have noticed that within
a three minute time frame, the storyline is broken done into three sections…
- A beginning
- A middle ( The climax)
- And end (The resolution)
And each section is roughly a minute long, so it is distributed evenly, although some short
films have a much shorter introduction varying between15-35 seconds, this allows more
time for the climax of the filmand resolution. I think this is a more sensible option, and this
allows us to almost go straight into the depth of the film, as three minutes is an incredibly
short time to fit the high volume of shots we want to include, therefore the quicker the
intro, the more time we have to include as many as we can.
We have decided as a team that the duration should be as follows:
The introduction: Any time between 15-40 seconds
Climax (Central part of the film): 1.10 ( 70 seconds)
The end (Resolution): 1.00 (60 seconds)
*This leaves 10 seconds which we will use for credits at the end, although if any section fails
to meet the timing guidelines we have set ourselves, there may be another section which
exceeds our guideline, so we can assign the time over to another section.
Three minutes seems a limited slot to tell a story, although you can create real emotion in
just a few minutes, which is essential within our filmmaking process, we just need to ensure
we use microaspects such as sound in order to create the desired emotion and response
from our audience.
We must ‘show’ not tell, after all filmis a visual medium ,therefore showing emotion
through body language and the camera angles are more important than words, as words
take up time. For example, you could have a 10 second shot of someone shouting at a child,
although you could have a two second shot being a low angle one, where the child is made
to look intimidated, this would still create the same emotion and have the same impact on
the audience, although you have saved yourself 8 seconds.
What else is very important is the opening, you must make an impression in the first ten
seconds, as you would in the first ten pages of a book, you are still telling a story, just on a

2. much smaller scale, the time scale has been dramatically reduced, it is important that we
write a detailed script for our first ten seconds, then reduce the ‘lines’ into actions and
shots, rather than words, this way we will be visually communicating with the audience and
the silence will keep them gripped for the first ten seconds, once we have got their
attention we can drop the tense approach and we will have an attentive audience.