Film Courage: What are the main reasons someone should make a short film?
Kim Adelman, Author/Filmmaker/Instructor: Here’s the great thing about short filmmaking, I truly believe everybody should make a short film if you want to. I’m not going to force you to make a short film if you’re not interested, but there’s nothing to stop anybody from making a short film. If you have something you want to say or make or maybe you just want to experiment and try to do something because the experimental is also a really fabulous category of short films, go for it! Nobody ever regrets having made a short film and one of the reasons is it’s not so financially disabling as making a feature. A feature you put a lot of money in and a lot of people’s expectations and it really has to deliver. Short film, short time commitment to make, hopefully very, very little money that you put into it. So why not go ahead and do it. I always encourage people to make short films. I think often you’ll find at festivals (the festival people will tell you too) the people who have the most fun at film festivals are the short filmmakers because nothing’s really riding on it. It’s not like there’s a lot of investment, you’re just there, you’ve made something you’re proud of and you’re like Hello world, here I am! I’m now a filmmaker and that’s the great thing about shorts too, it’s that nice bridge from I’d love to be a filmmaker to actually being a filmmaker, the fastest way to do that is to make a short film. Having said that I also don’t think you should make it so precious like I must have the perfect thing before I can become a short filmmaker. I do think, and this is also what’s kind of nice about film school, you can make a lot of small things to kind of experiment and do stuff and find your voice that you don’t necessarily need to show the world that it could just be something for you to experiment and to find what you are as a filmmaker, to exercise your filmmaking muscles. It doesn’t have to be shared with the world…(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.
MAKING IT BIG IN SHORT: Shorter, Faster, Cheaper: The Ultimate Filmmaker’s Guide to Short Films
CONNECT WITH KIM ADELMAN
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