How about an editor?

I spent some time today -- over the course of a few breaks -- watching films in the Amazon.com/Tribeca Film Festival Short Film Competition. It's an interesting idea: filmmakers submit short films, Amazon customers watch and rate them, and they get winnowed down that way for the second round of competition.

The four films I watched over the course of the day were all basically entertaining, and exhibited a pretty good level of craft -- and mostly shot on film, which surprised me.

They all had the same problem, though: They all needed a damn editor. At roughly six minutes each, they all felt long.

I understand that these are films by people at the beginning of their careers, but it still seems as though they should have learned a better sense of pacing by the time they're producing films that look this good.

To me, a good short film is like a good short story: there's absolutely no time for extraneous material. Characters need to be defined in only the most essential ways. Ideas must be crystal clear, and they need to communicate immediately. If an idea needs to be shown more than once to communicate, there's something wrong. Over the course of six minutes, you've got to nail your concepts and sell them.

Great ads are good examples to follow -- they show just enough to communicate the idea, and no more; pacing has to be perfect, because they generally only have 30 seconds to tell the story. A good example is the shipping company ad I linked to back in July. Watch it; it's a great example of spare, perfect characterization and story. Within the first four seconds we know the character is bored, spending his days in a dark warehouse doing a repetitive job, and probably eats poorly -- and then, whoosh, we're on to the action of the story. This in contrast to two of the films I saw where the characters never developed any clear personality of their own.

I'm reminded of Brian Eno's story about the creation of the Windows sound for Windows 95:

"The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. I'd been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. And I really appreciated someone coming along and saying, 'Here's a specific problem -- solve it.' The thing from the agency said, 'We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah-blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional,' this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said 'and it must be 3 1/4 seconds long.' I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It's like making a tiny little jewel. In fact, I made 84 pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I'd finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time."

Watch some for yourself -- I'm curious to hear whether a) this is a general thing, or I was just lucky, and b) whether I'm just a crabby old man before my time, and the films are just fine, thank you.

Of course, the next thing is for me to put my money where my mouth is and make my own damn 30 second film. (Even my silly little sketch clocks in at 44 seconds)

(and no, the irony that this is my longest post in months is not lost on me)