1. Short Form Film: Text & Exhibition
By Mark Chapman
Contemporary Media Issues
Week 18

2. AIMS:
• I aim to explore some of the extra-textual
pressures on short film production
• focus on contemporary distribution and
exhibition practices and how they influence the
final product
• consider the consequences for creativity and
personal expression
• explore how different exhibition spaces effect the
consumption of shorts and what impact it has
had on the narratives themselves.

3. Technology & the filmmaker
Filmmaker Luis Buñuel wrote, “If in thirty or fifty
years the screen no longer exists, if editing isn’t
necessary, cinema will have ceased to exist. That’s
already almost the case when a film is shown on
television: the smallness of the screen falsifies
everything. What will remain, then, of my films?”
(Buñuel 1980: 74)

4. Tradition vs. Innovation
Expressing his anxiety regarding the transient
nature of the cinema, an art form intimately and
perpetually tied to technological innovation.
Buñuel, who directed perhaps the most celebrated
film of the short form, Un Chien Andalou (1929),
reveals the inherently ambivalent relationship many
filmmakers have with emergent technology and its
consequences for their films. What would he make
of the growing number of people who watch films
on their mobile phone?

5. Digitization
• Digitalization has led to similar discussions in
other areas of media production, such as:
• The changes to broadcast news brought about
by the advent of 24 hour news coverage
• The internet changing print media
• The switch from film to digital video

6. What is a short film?
• Though the term short form encompasses
numerous diverse types of filmmaking including
fiction films, experimental installations,
documentaries, user-generated Internet videos,
commercials and music videos.
• Minus the commercial imperatives of mainstream
feature length films and the dwindling number of
sales to television (certainly in the UK), the
primary exhibition platforms for shorts are now
the film festival circuit and online.

7. JADE by Daniel Elliott
Daniel Elliott’s drama Jade centres on its
eponymous sixteen year old protagonist
(played by Aisling Loftus), a promising
swimmer, who discovers that she is pregnant.
In a relationship with Stephen (Michael Socha),
but infatuated by an older, married man, John
(Jonny Philips), Jade must quickly decide in
whom to confide.

8. JADE
• Funded by UKFC
• Filmed on 16mm filmstock
• Character based narrative
• 15 minutes long
• Won the Silver Bear for short film at the Berlin
Film Festival (an ‘A’ list festival)
• Developing his first feature film

9. JADE – Narrative techniques
• Early distribution of situational information
• Gapping strategy consists of a series of reveals
of varying impact (both heavy and light)
• Jade is often one step ahead of the audience.
The audience is often left to speculate at her
motivation
• No moral judgement of the main protagonist
allowing the audience to engage their own
moral compass

10. THE BLACK HOLE

11. THE BLACK HOLE
• Won Virgin Media Shorts online competition
• 3 minutes long
• Over 15 million views on Youtube
• Based on a Looney Tunes cartoon THE HOLE IDEA
• Went on to make a short, Archeology, with the
prize money https://vimeo.com/33411569

12. BLACK HOLE – Narrative Techniques
• strategies are identification and situational positioning
of its audience; every detail of the film is included
chiefly to advance its traditional cause/effect events
• we do not learn anything about the protagonist except
what is required by the demands of comprehension of
the plot
• features a different kind of gapping strategy, a
suppressed gap - the black hole.
• The spectator is initially encouraged to identify with
the unnamed protagonist and share in the excitement,
but as his greed overwhelms him, a shift of perspective
allows the split between audience and protagonist.

13. Expanded Exhibition
• Thomas Elsaesser argues that the computer interface
used by sites like YouTube constitutes a new beginning
for the spectator’s relationship to the text, one whose
authority is passed from the storyteller to the user.
Without a centred, coherent diegesis, these (non-
linear) links of short content become inferential gaps in
a wider exploration of the computer interface,
becoming what Elsaesser terms, ’the digital
picaresque.’ (Elsaesser 2009: 181) This has far reaching
implications for ‘traditional’ theories of the cinematic
apparatus as spectator transforms into user.

14. Film as Advertising
Digital technology has had a significant effect on
the consumption of visual media, modifying
viewing habits and creating a new market for hybrid
forms such as the ever-evolving relationship
between cinema and advertising. But although far
removed from crude actuality content available on
YouTube, The Black Hole, with its novelty form and
the slick professionalism made possible by the
increased awareness and low-cost of digital video
technology, marks a union between these two
polarities.

15. ‘Free’ content?
• This union highlights an increasing trend for
companies to turn towards user-generated shorts as
an inexpensive means to create a steady stream of
video content for multi-platform promotion. Virgin
Media made The Black Hole, along with eleven other
short-listed films, available in cinemas, mobile phones,
video-on-demand (VOD) services and online (Baker
2008). The benefits to the brands are plentiful -free
ideas and content, potential to discover new talent,
cultural cache- but the benefits for the majority of
filmmakers are less apparent. The competition
received over fourteen hundred entries- an enormous
amount of free content.

16. ‘We actually wrote a completely different idea and
were about a week away from shooting when we
read the small print, and realised the film had to
be a PG.’ Olly Williams
The recent emphasis on the creation of
advertisements means that filmmaker sensibility is
often secondary to the needs and requirements of
advertising companies. These compromises are
seldom insignificant, affecting every aspect of a
filmmaker’s work.
Filmmaker sensibility?

17. Filmmakers & Festivals
• The benefits of festival exposure:
• Facilitates the necessary enculturation process in the infrastructures of the film
industry, e.g. visit film markets, meet funders, etc.
• Allows filmmakers watch their films and to talk directly about them with audiences
• Encourages the filmmaker to be reflective of their practice
• Confidence building
• Networking and developing relationships with peers
A brief observation of the comments generated from The Black Hole’s
YouTube page suggests that there is little value in seeking feedback of a
similar quality online. (CODexpertCY’s ‘lol awsome’, wakamachulet’s ‘its more
fun if he accidentally pulled out his organs hehe’ and amongbeyo’s ‘omg this
is so stupid.’)

18. Conclusion
• Replicating Buñuel’s fears of the effect of television,
disquiet surrounding online distribution and exhibition
can perhaps be attributed to the conspicuous presence
to the new technological apparatus. This is likely to
abate once it has been properly assimilated. The
developments online allows unprecedented level of
creative freedom for filmmakers. But as the Internet
becomes more commercialized, without a suitable
financial model for remuneration, there is a danger
that many filmmakers, often young and eager for
exposure, will work without benefits as they generate
material for large international companies.