Film Courage: What is the story structure of a short film?
Kim Adelman, Author/Filmmaker/Instructor: I like writing a logline. First to say What in the world is your short film, even if you don’t think you’re going to have it written down. When you talk to people about having them be part of your film they’re going to say What’s your film about? You should have a logline that can tell people what your film is and if you write it ahead of time and have it ready to spew and say easily, then that is really a good thing. Ultimately you’re going to have to tell people what your film is about whatsoever. When you finish your film, and if you want to put it online or send it out in the festival circuit, you have to write a long line that gets sent with that film. That logline they print verbatim. One of the short films I produced was a film called I’m On Fire and it’s about a guy who’s on fire. We had special effects to put them on fire so the filmmaker wrote the log line and we’re like What the hell is the logline going to be for this? because before he comes out in theory you don’t know he’s going to be on fire and then he’s on fire. The filmmaker came up with a logline A very short film about a man on fire, pretty much said what it was and…(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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