How to Write a Short Film

What a short can do that a feature cannot

A feature has to justify 110 pages, which means it needs a premise with enough surface area for escalation, subplot and reversal. A short needs only a moment. That is a freedom, not a limitation: the audience arrives willing to be dropped into someone's life with no context at all, because they can hold the whole thing in working memory.

• One scene is a legitimate short. A three-minute film can be a single uninterrupted conversation in one room.
• Unresolved endings are allowed. A feature that ends on a question feels like a cheat; a short that ends on an image can be complete without a verdict.
• Formal risk is cheap. A short can be shot in one take, on a phone, in black and white, with no dialogue — choices that would carry feature-length commercial weight.
• You can be specific instead of representative. A feature about grief must be about grief in general terms. A short can be about one man deciding whether to keep his brother's voicemail.

The trade is that a short must deliver something a feature does not have to earn: a change. If nothing has changed by the last frame, the audience experiences a scene, not a story.

Length: five to fifteen pages, and what festivals do with that

Standard screenplay format calibrates one page to roughly one minute of runtime, so an eight-page short is an eight-minute film. That number governs everything about where the script can go.

• Programmes are built in blocks. Festival shorts programmes are assembled from films of similar length, most commonly 5–15 minutes. A 6-minute film and a 28-minute film do not sit comfortably in the same block.
• Submission forms ask for runtime. At the point of submission you are competing against other films of comparable length, and a programmer who has ninety minutes to fill will take three 8-minute films over one 24-minute film almost every time.
• The eligibility ceiling is far above the practical one. The Academy's short film categories accept live-action and animated shorts up to 40 minutes, but being eligible and being selected are different things. The medium-length short — 20 to 40 minutes — is the hardest to place, because it occupies a block without the economy of a short or the weight of a feature.

For a first short, aim for 8 to 12 pages. Long enough for a real turn, short enough that the budget, the schedule and the edit are all survivable.

One idea, one turn: enter late, leave early

Write your short's idea as a single sentence — and be strict about what counts. A widow keeps calling her dead husband's phone to hear his voicemail greeting until the line is disconnected. That is one idea. A widow grieves, adopts a dog, and reconnects with her daughter is three, which is a feature outline wearing a short film's length.

Every scene in a short must serve that one idea. If a scene exists to establish something rather than to escalate it, it belongs in a longer work.

The craft move that makes short scripts read tight is enter late, leave early. Start the scene after the setup has already happened, and cut before the scene explains itself:

INT. KITCHEN - NIGHT

Empty plates. Two wine glasses, one untouched.

                    NADIA
          Say it again and I'll take the car.

                    OMAR
          Take the car.

No arrival, no greetings, no exit. The audience fills in the ten minutes before this and does not need the ten after it.

The turn is what separates a short from a sketch. A sketch escalates: the situation gets worse, funnier or louder. A short turns: the audience's understanding of the situation changes, or the character's only remaining option becomes the one they refused at the start. Hold your ending up against that test before you shoot anything, because a short with escalation and no turn is the most common submission in every festival in the world.

Write for what you can actually shoot

A short script is a production document as much as a story. Every speaking role, every location and every night exterior is a line in a budget you will personally be raising, so write the film your resources can carry.

• Two or three speaking roles. More actors means more schedules, more auditions, more no-shows. A two-hander is the most shootable short there is, and it also produces the densest scenes.
• One to three locations, one of them free. Your flat, a friend's cafe, a park. Write the kitchen instead of the restaurant, the car instead of the airport.
• Daylight over night. Night exteriors need lighting, generators, permits and a crew large enough to move fast before the neighbours complain.
• No crowd, no stunts, no children, no animals. Each one adds a person whose job is to make that element safe, and you do not have that person.
• Cars are locations. A scene in a moving car means towing, a rig, or a driver whose attention is on the road rather than the take.

Then budget the pages against the story, because a ten-page short has room for exactly one complication:

The short as a proof of concept

Shorts are also how a feature gets financed, and this is where most of them go wrong. A proof of concept has one job: demonstrate the thing an investor cannot picture from a pitch. If your feature is a contained thriller set in one location, the short must show that the location can hold tension for ninety minutes. If it is a comedy of manners, the short must show the tone landing with a real audience.

A mood piece does neither. Ten beautiful minutes of atmosphere with no turn proves that you can direct a landscape, not that a feature would work.

The alternative approach — filming five pages from the feature itself rather than writing a standalone short — works when the extracted scene contains its own turn and its own ending. Taken out of context, most feature scenes are setup, which is exactly what a short cannot afford. If you go this route, either choose a scene that stands alone or rewrite it so it does.

One practical note: if the short is a proof of concept, write it so a viewer who never sees the feature still gets a complete experience. Finished films get seen; finished films plus a pitch get funded.

The six failures that kill short scripts

1. The sketch with no turn. Escalation without reversal. The film ends at the same temperature it started, one notch louder. Fix: decide what the audience believes at minute one and what they believe at the end, then build toward that difference.
2. The feature opening. An alarm clock, a shower, a commute, an arrival. The story begins on page 6 of a 10-page script. Fix: delete the first two pages of every draft and see what is missing.
3. Two ideas stapled together. Each one would make a fine short; together, neither gets the room it needs. Fix: pick the one with the turn and save the other for next year.
4. The trick ending. A final reveal that invalidates the film rather than recontextualising it. The audience feels cheated because nothing they watched mattered. Fix: the twist should make earlier scenes mean more, not less.
5. More characters than actors. Six speaking roles written for a two-person shoot. Fix: merge the roles. Two characters doing the work of six usually produces sharper scenes anyway.
6. Open but unfinished. An unresolved ending is a choice; stopping early is a mistake. Fix: the last image must land as an image the viewer can read, even if it withholds the answer.

Then read it aloud with people who will not flatter you. A short is short enough that a single bad table read is fixable in an afternoon, which is the whole advantage of the form.

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