How short is too short?

[Dave Watterson]

An Austrian festival is now seeking entrants for films of up to 12 seconds.

Aaargh!

On the other hand many contests for one-minute movies used to insist on each film lasting exactly 60 seconds ... which led to padding!

How short can a film be and still work?

[Howard-Smith]

I think that a film less than a minute long is hardly worthwhile… though the shorter the running time the less appropriate it is to say that it’s a waste of time.

[Richard Scarsbrook]

An interesting question. What do we mean by "a film"? Perhaps the distinction is between "spectacle" - a loop on TikTok of someone pulling a silly face, a clip of an armoured vehicle crushing a passing car in Ukraine - and "story" - an edited sequence of images deliberately constructed to convey some meaning beyond what is shown by the raw footage. "Story" is what I think of as "a film". It's about content not duration.

Take a look at this YouTube compilation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnEDV9ftJrQ of the top 20 winners of the 15 Second Horror Film Challenge 2018. It's not a genre I normally watch, but the entries are technically excellent, and definitely tell a story (winners are shown in reverse order with #1 at 5:15. The higher placed ones are clearly better).

In literature there's a genre of ultra-short stories, sometimes called flash fiction. One of the most well known is this six word story often attributed to Ernest Hemingway. "For sale, baby shoes. Never worn". I'm sure you could make a poignant 3 shot 12 second film of that.

[John Simpson]

Take a look at this YouTube compilation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnEDV9ftJrQ of the top 20 winners of the 15 Second Horror Film Challenge 2018. It's not a genre I normally watch, but the entries are technically excellent, and definitely tell a story (winners are shown in reverse order with #1 at 5:15. The higher placed ones are clearly better)."[

20 reasons why I think horror is sick/bad!