Authors

There Is No Story Structure For Short Films – Kim Adelman

Filmcourage

Published

August 21, 2022

[Watch the video interview on YouTube here]

Film Courage: What is the story structure of a short film?

Kim Adelman, Author/Filmmaker/Instructor: Because short films can do anything or say anything and they should be unexpected and you can do your ending at the beginning and you’re beginning at the end, there is no structure. But I do think simplicity helps a lot. I don’t think you should have a hundred different characters with a hundred different plots going on and A, B lines, it’s not like screenwriting. When people do short film screenwriting I’m always like What could you be talking about because there aren’t the same kind of rules as there are for features. It really depends on what story you want to tell. Then I just think it’s a lot about simplification and really bringing it down to a simple idea. One thing I love about short films because I’m known for short films, people always say to me Oh I saw this really great short film and then they’ll tell me the short film that they saw. I haven’t visually seen it but I’ve heard someone tell me and I’ll be like That sounds like a great short film. I kind of feel like I’ve seen it because they were able to tell me the whole plot of what it was. Your short story, your short film should work in that way that people can tell you what it is but a lot of them are just visual. One of my favorite kinds of short films are dialogue-free short films where there’s absolutely no dialogue but it is all told, not like an old-fashioned running, pushing a piano up the hill and having a fall down Laurel and Hardy kind of thing, but just you can tell a story with visuals the actual old-fashioned visual filmmaking way and it’s great. I’ll also say the short films with no dialogue translate very well for different countries. People love films with no dialogue because it’s universal, it’s going to be a universal story of something that is told through cinema, it’s a very cinematic way of telling a story. You can do anything you want to do and I could try to talk you out of like Don’t do…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).

BIO:

Kim Adelman is the author of Making It Big in Shorts. She produced 19 short films that won 30+ awards and played over 150 film festivals worldwide, including the Sundance Film Festival four years in a row. Ms. Adelman currently teaches Cinema Production 2 at Mount St. Mary’s University and Low Budget Filmmaking at UCLA Extension, where she was honored as Entertainment Studies Instructor of the Year in 2014 and won the Distinguished Instructor Award in 2016.