misc Are short films the least respected form of art?

[Nate North]

I think you're describing pretty much what we are planning to do. Something we are looking into is actually just training the AI on a single mannequin head for all characters, since if it trains on a default set that never changes, we only have to weight the facial adjustments on one side of the transfer. That may not be possible, but if it is, it could save a huge amount of time spent adjusting facial alignments on each character.

This video is badly made, but it does show what our characters will look like post process. This is metahuman creator plus deepfake, and It's not a problem to train in makeup or demon face or whatever. For a final product, I'll want to go further than this guy did, and really make the tech work smoothly. It doesn't look bad here though, just right out of the box with minimal effort.

Maybe when I'm ready to test this out in a full scene, I'll make a video where Bruce Lee fights The Harlem Globetrotters on top of cars in moving traffic, like the matrix interstate fight scene with the agents jumping from car to car.

 

[CelticRambler]

Nate started a thread about how the most succesful short film creator in the world earns about 80k a year (not including taxes, private health insurance costs, no 401k matching) and that his fame level is so low we've never heard of him

Don't want to hijack that one but it got me thinking that perhaps short films are the least respected form of art?

A regular painter, ...
Singers ...
Literature writers ...
Architects ...
Standup comedians ...

What's the common theme with the list above? These artists don't need anyone else to make their work come to life. They're solo performers, using only the force of their personality and, at most, some off-the-shelf equipment. Sure, to "make it big" they usually need to have either the good fortune to be spotted by a talent hunter or be in the right place at the right time to have their idea turned into a concrete reality, but between TV interviews, they can continue to work on new material without any third party input whatsoever.

So the only valid comparison is between the producers or directors of shorts and features. There, there are probably more similarities than differences - and that's the problem: from the perspective of "making a movie" a short is going to (or at least should) require as big a creative and technical team as a feature, with consequences for budgets too. Isn't that one of the points that's regularly made on the technical threads of this forum? Don't try to direct and be your own cameraman; have a dedicated sound guy; pay for decent catering; get proper actors instead of friends of your mother's sister, etc ...

I would argue that one reason people don't voluntarily choose to watch shorts is that a lot of them are just not very good - because they're almost inevitably made on the cheap, with compromises made at every step of the process. So if no-one watches them, their directors are never going to get known. On the other hand, I would also argue that millions upon millions of people involuntarily watch well-made shorts, and don't just watch them but share them too. Only these are poo-poohed by "serious" film-makers because they're more commonly called advertisements. You might not know the names of the directors, but you probably do know the names of the sponsor.

Back in the world of "real" movies, if you carried out a quick survey in the lobby of any multiplex cinema, chances are the majority would be able to name quite a few of the actors on the screens that day - but how many would list off more than one producer or director (at most)?

Another one of @Nate North 's threads (or it might have been the same one!) had me thinking that there's a certain snobbishness in the independent movie maker community, with a lot of "video content" written off as not cinematic because ... well, just because. There are now thousands of people making well more than 80k a year producing dramatic works using a video camera and editing software - but because they publish their work on YouTube - often under the guise of some kind of documentary - they're written off as irrelevant. Now I'd agree that the standard of lighting, sound, camerawork, scripting and editing leaves a lot to be desired, but in what way is a 15-minute YouTube video not equivalent to a 15-minute silver screen short?

 

[Nate North]

What's the common theme with the list above? These artists don't need anyone else to make their work come to life. They're solo performers, using only the force of their personality and, at most, some off-the-shelf equipment. Sure, to "make it big" they usually need to have either the good fortune to be spotted by a talent hunter or be in the right place at the right time to have their idea turned into a concrete reality, but between TV interviews, they can continue to work on new material without any third party input whatsoever.

So the only valid comparison is between the producers or directors of shorts and features. There, there are probably more similarities than differences - and that's the problem: from the perspective of "making a movie" a short is going to (or at least should) require as big a creative and technical team as a feature, with consequences for budgets too. Isn't that one of the points that's regularly made on the technical threads of this forum? Don't try to direct and be your own cameraman; have a dedicated sound guy; pay for decent catering; get proper actors instead of friends of your mother's sister, etc ...

I would argue that one reason people don't voluntarily choose to watch shorts is that a lot of them are just not very good - because they're almost inevitably made on the cheap, with compromises made at every step of the process. So if no-one watches them, their directors are never going to get known. On the other hand, I would also argue that millions upon millions of people involuntarily watch well-made shorts, and don't just watch them but share them too. Only these are poo-poohed by "serious" film-makers because they're more commonly called advertisements. You might not know the names of the directors, but you probably do know the names of the sponsor.

Back in the world of "real" movies, if you carried out a quick survey in the lobby of any multiplex cinema, chances are the majority would be able to name quite a few of the actors on the screens that day - but how many would list off more than one producer or director (at most)?

Another one of @Nate North 's threads (or it might have been the same one!) had me thinking that there's a certain snobbishness in the independent movie maker community, with a lot of "video content" written off as not cinematic because ... well, just because. There are now thousands of people making well more than 80k a year producing dramatic works using a video camera and editing software - but because they publish their work on YouTube - often under the guise of some kind of documentary - they're written off as irrelevant. Now I'd agree that the standard of lighting, sound, camerawork, scripting and editing leaves a lot to be desired, but in what way is a 15-minute YouTube video not equivalent to a 15-minute silver screen short?

I agree with all that completely. The issue is that this is a process designed for teams, and you're competing for viewer attention against teams, so to me what this feels like is trying to win a baseball game against a team by myself. I might be intellectually capable of performing every job on that baseball team, but I can't equal the energy output and practice time of 30 people.

About the Youtube Filmmakers, you're absolutely right. Those 45 minute youtube documentaries are...... documentary films. There's no special name, they aren't different, they just got digitally packaged and distributed. This is really the modern indie film market. What we once knew is now obsolete, and it won't be coming back.

The future has a lot of problems with it, some I've outlined above via my scathing rhetoric about the leisure class tightening down the screws on the global caste system, but also, we've got a lot of people on this bandwagon. And it doesn't stop there. We don't just have a lot more good quality filmmakers, we also have an avalanche of terrible filmmakers, or (dunning krueger narcissists) as I fondly refer to them. You're not just competing with the 1000 times as many filmmakers, but also with the posers, who now have no filter. It's probably a net win since the filter would have strained out all the talented people as well, but now we have this noise pollution issue.

Short films aren't inherently bad, it's a perceived association due to what people are talking about above. Scorsese could make a good short film, and I particularly enjoyed Marvin the Martian during my youth. I don't mean film students practicing, I mean the kid that has 12 million dollars for publishing Minecraft videos where he yells "wheeee" every time he hits a frog with a shovel. It's not the same audience, you might say, but in some sense, it is, because each million hit video WILL be recommended before your painstaking animated pointillism recreation of Twelfth Night that took you 6 years to make. There is ultimately a zero sum game out there, and the adpocalypse was proof that we are entering a phase where the system designed to fuel entertainment is overloaded. People playing video games live is probably eating up about 20% of national internet broadcast income for example.

To a large degree I blame audiences for being indiscriminate in their financial support. It's certainly not fair to creators when a guy plays 3 minutes of pac man and gets enough donations to make a feature film, and a person makes a feature film, and doesn't even recieve enough money to pay for lunch. We now have guys that just yell "bro" and "sick" as though on some invisible 3 second timer, and make over 10 million a year as video creators. Did you see Samsara? A guy playing video games for fun in his room got about the same fiscal return as they did, after 11 years filming and editing, with a budget, under one of the greatest cinematographers of our time.

Youtube has become a monopoly. There is no way around that. It's like Amazon, in that if you step down to the no 2 option, you are often loosing your entire margin of profitability. This is now in some sense the dystopian future the serious drama film "Demolition Man" warned us about, where a single corporation allows private individuals to make laws affecting the entire country. I'm referring of course to youtube's though policing, which no one gets a vote in, but affects more people than most congressional decisions, on a day to day earnings level.

As a disclaimer, for those that don't know me, I am not a crazed political person trying to organize the reversion to pre vaccine days, I just want to have an occasional gunfight in my show without looking over my shoulder to see if my business income has been remotely disconnected by a robot, because a popular teen singer tweeted that "guns are the no 1 motive for murder", after hearing that from a youtuber that was propelled to fame after winning the "Cough Syrip Challenge" and now lives in Anthony Hopkins old house in LA with a 2 picture deal about a subject "TBD"

 

[James Rogers]

Nate, you sound a little bitter.

I just try to remember that nobody owes nobody nothin',

 

[James Rogers]

In my opinion, the biggest deficit for any Indie production, short film or feature, is that they are shot on video and they look like video.
Video looks like shit. Fully funded films use the best digital cinema cameras, best post process, and even they don't truly look as good as good old fashion film does. So much money trying to simulate something that was abandoned for no good reason except to usher in the new technology... A big step backwards if you ask me.

Here's a short film from a Chicago film student back in the 80s. No production value, no recognizable actors, but it's good. I believe the one thing is has going for it is that it was shot on 16mm film. I believe if it was shot on video, it would have been terrible.

Daily Mass

Samurai Cop. A feature film that could easily be voted the worst film ever made. It makes The Room look like a masterpiece. Terrible EVERYTHING in this film, yet it has developed a cult following and is moderately successful. I love this film! I watch it once or twice a year.. You can hardly find a copy of the movie for less than 20 bucks.

I've tried for years to explain myself on this point but I don't think I can. The best I've been able to come up with is this; Film washes away reality. Video preserves it. Video is great for porn and works well for documentaries. Film is for everything else.

 

[Nate North]

Nate, you sound a little bitter.

I just try to remember that nobody owes nobody nothin',

Oh I'm not bitter, try to imagine it in a George Carlin voice, that's closer to my intent.

 

[James Rogers]

You'd think with the reach of the Internet, the small guy could still find a way.
Billions of people on the planet. It should not be impossible to find 100,000 of them willing to spend $1 to watch a film that doesn't totally suck.
Anyone can start a website that included Streaming Video service and the turnkey software for PPV or subscription.
Maybe take out some ads in local papers in strategic cities and towns. Get on the local news, saturate social media, word of mouth.
It all sounds so simple, but not having tried it myself, I suppose either nobody else has tried or they have and it didn't work...

Yet the sisters of a woman with loose moral values that became famous for a sex video a few decades ago are now also celebrities and making more money in a year than any group of us will make in our lives for doing pretty much nothing but standing around .

Yeah, life's fair.

 

[sfoster]

What's the common theme with the list above? These artists don't need anyone else to make their work come to life. They're solo performers, using only the force of their personality and, at most, some off-the-shelf equipment. Sure, to "make it big" they usually need to have either the good fortune to be spotted by a talent hunter or be in the right place at the right time to have their idea turned into a concrete reality, but between TV interviews, they can continue to work on new material without any third party input whatsoever.

So the only valid comparison is between the producers or directors of shorts and features. There, there are probably more similarities than differences - and that's the problem: from the perspective of "making a movie" a short is going to (or at least should) require as big a creative and technical team as a feature, with consequences for budgets too. Isn't that one of the points that's regularly made on the technical threads of this forum? Don't try to direct and be your own cameraman; have a dedicated sound guy; pay for decent catering; get proper actors instead of friends of your mother's sister, etc ...

I would argue that one reason people don't voluntarily choose to watch shorts is that a lot of them are just not very good - because they're almost inevitably made on the cheap, with compromises made at every step of the process. So if no-one watches them, their directors are never going to get known. On the other hand, I would also argue that millions upon millions of people involuntarily watch well-made shorts, and don't just watch them but share them too. Only these are poo-poohed by "serious" film-makers because they're more commonly called advertisements. You might not know the names of the directors, but you probably do know the names of the sponsor.

Back in the world of "real" movies, if you carried out a quick survey in the lobby of any multiplex cinema, chances are the majority would be able to name quite a few of the actors on the screens that day - but how many would list off more than one producer or director (at most)?

Another one of @Nate North 's threads (or it might have been the same one!) had me thinking that there's a certain snobbishness in the independent movie maker community, with a lot of "video content" written off as not cinematic because ... well, just because. There are now thousands of people making well more than 80k a year producing dramatic works using a video camera and editing software - but because they publish their work on YouTube - often under the guise of some kind of documentary - they're written off as irrelevant. Now I'd agree that the standard of lighting, sound, camerawork, scripting and editing leaves a lot to be desired, but in what way is a 15-minute YouTube video not equivalent to a 15-minute silver screen short?

It's completely irrelevant how the sausage is made, nobody gives a fuck while they are watching a film how many producers it had, how many collaborators made a painting, etc all they care about is the END PRODUCT that is in front of them and how it impacts them.
(EDIT: and audiences compare them all the time "the book was better" etc)

It's funny you said it's an invalid comparision to compare the 7 different forms of art

7 different forms of art: An easy guide - Eden Gallery

www.eden-gallery.com

I strongly disagree with that statement that the different forms of art cannot be compared with how society recieves them.
I also think there is an enormous difference between something on the silver screen and youtube, being that people PAID MONEY to sit down in front of that silver screen. And on youtube people are sitting down on a shitter and watching for free. there's a difference between someone taking a shit and watching your art, and someone that paid money to see it and made a night out of it.

 

[James Rogers]

being that people PAID MONEY to sit down in front of that silver screen. And on youtube people are sitting down on a shitter and watching for free. there's a difference between someone taking a shit and watching your art, and someone that paid money to see it and made a night out of it.

LOL! That made my day.

At the theater, people pay to see what they are allowed to see.
Ed Wood films made it to the theater. In the 60's and 70s films like Octoman, the incredible melting man, texas chainsaw massacre, last house on the left, Let's Scare Jessica to Death, and night of the Living dead to name a few, made it to the theater. ........ Today? not.

 

[sfoster]

Short films aren't inherently bad, it's a perceived association due to what people are talking about above

I get the argument that it's a quality control issue.. like, if every short film I watched in my life had an explosive ending I'd probably be down to watch them more often. I still wouldn't binge them for 2 hours straight, but yeah I get your argument...

The youtube channel Short of the Week, with 759k subscribers.. look at their latest video uploads.
1.4k views, 2.8k views, 1.5k views, etc - lol pathetic.

This is for a channel dedicated to quality control for a select audience that SUBSCRIBED to short films and even this subset doesn't want to watch them lol!

Horror does a lot better with youtube channel Alter with 2.7m subscribers
12k, 35k, 34k, still really pathetic compared to the number of subscribers though.

What a dumpster fire trying to get people to watch your film lol

 

[Nate North]

You'd think with the reach of the Internet, the small guy could still find a way.
Billions of people on the planet. It should not be impossible to find 100,000 of them willing to spend $1 to watch a film that doesn't totally suck.
Anyone can start a website that included Streaming Video service and the turnkey software for PPV or subscription.
Maybe take out some ads in local papers in strategic cities and towns. Get on the local news, saturate social media, word of mouth.
It all sounds so simple, but not having tried it myself, I suppose either nobody else has tried or they have and it didn't work...

Yet the sisters of a woman with loose moral values that became famous for a sex video a few decades ago are now also celebrities and making more money in a year than any group of us will make in our lives for doing pretty much nothing but standing around .

Yeah, life's fair.

You are basically describing exactly what I did with a local documentary. I spent about 10k on it, and about 1,100 on ads, which was wrong, it should have been 6 and 5k respectively, but a budget that small gets eaten up by mandatory stuff. You can't "decide" not to buy gas to get to the shoots.

I called the local news stations, got a clip of the trailer on the air in several cities, we went to the local newspapers and let them interview us, then put up a web page, social media, a youtube channel, printed thousands of dvds (our target demo for this older) offered digital downloads in blue ray quality, purchased small televisions and GAVE them to every major local shop that would sell the film for a profit share, went in, hand connected them to cheap portable mp4 boxes, set them to loop indefinitely, and more. I think I got about 1 or 2 grand net, after 5 months of full time work.

But that was an isolated case study. You could do better. The main audience was a huge festival crowd, and the county didn't finish road repairs on time that year, creating huge traffic jams on dirt roads, resulting is a 60% revenue dip across all merchants the year it premiered. Next year was the start of covid.

Everyone else has seen it already, but since you are newer here, this was the film, a documentary about a historic district.

At the end of the day, I ended up getting a feature on my resume with no actual cash loss. But they paid a local singer 2500 dollars to sing a few cover songs at the park while I was shooting. I think he was there for an hour total. He had a 200,000 dollar tour bus, and he sang un unlicensed cover of Achy Breaky Heart at one point.

This is a whole other thread, or maybe it's not, but people just don't bother paying filmmakers. I've seen people go crazy because someone didn't tip a waiter 20 bucks for walking across a room, but if a filmmaker works for a week without pay, well, it's not important. I'm not just talking making your own films. I've worked for corporations, and had them decide not to pay for a day when "nothing happened in front of the camera". (like they wanted a big crowd in the video, and one didn't show up, so they "can't use" your footage) The people in charge of plugging in the extension cords had a union guy on site with them, demanding white glove treatment of the cord pluggers.

 

[Nate North]

I get the argument that it's a quality control issue.. like, if every short film I watched in my life had an explosive ending I'd probably be down to watch them more often. I still wouldn't binge them for 2 hours straight, but yeah I get your argument...

The youtube channel Short of the Week, with 759k subscribers.. look at their latest video uploads.
1.4k views, 2.8k views, 1.5k views, etc - lol pathetic.

This is for a channel dedicated to quality control for a select audience that SUBSCRIBED to short films and even this subset doesn't want to watch them lol!

Horror does a lot better with youtube channel Alter with 2.7m subscribers
12k, 35k, 34k, still really pathetic compared to the number of subscribers though.

What a dumpster fire trying to get people to watch your film lol

My perception is that we're dealing with mandatory minimums. Simply put 90 minutes is the absolute minimum. For real income, you need to sell ads, so on tv, where the ads pay better, you have 22:30 and 44:30, but you need at least 10 of them, which is more than 90. You can just do a pilot, and that might work, but it's risky. Most of them get tossed.

Expectation plays into perception, which is I think what your comment was about. If it's on tv, it must be good enough for me to watch. So I'll give it more time, and maybe I'm here long enough to get hooked. With a short film, there's barely enough time to get attached to anything, and then you know there's not another episode, so your investment into that fiction has tanked after 5 minutes.

I don't really want to, but I'm thinking of turning "Flood" into a feature, simply because I can sell it to a smaller network if I do, and perhaps get the money I need to set up proper fundraising for the real project. Animated features are still rare enough for a guaranteed sale if you are competent. It's just a lot of difficult work.

 

[James Rogers]

Religious films make money. The rational behind that fact is that religious people are more interested in the message than production quality or presentation. Tell them a story they've heard a thousand times and they'll still watch it.

Religious film and horror films. They are as close to any kind of guaranteed audience there is for Indies.

 

[Nate North]

Religious films make money. The rational behind that fact is that religious people are more interested in the message than production quality or presentation. Tell them a story they've heard a thousand times and they'll still watch it.

Religious film and horror films. They are as close to any kind of guaranteed audience there is for Indies.

Actually family films also do well, but there's a lot of overlap between family and religeous demos. I wouldn't mind making something like "White fang" it's not to far off from what I'm already doing. I like R rated movies, like predator, but for a pay bump, I think I could really enjoy producing a g rated film.

 

[James Rogers]

I'm with you on that. The 'claymation' movie I told you about would be PG...

 

[James Rogers]

Here's something to sink you teeth into.
The Horror Report

Published 2017. A little bit dated but still, a comprehensive look at movie trends and why horror films are as close to a safe bet for Indie film makers as we can hope for.

 

[Nate North]

I'm with you on that. The 'claymation' movie I told you about would be PG...

I think what I'm making right now would probably be PG. (here we go again) the issue is the MPAA ratings system, which dictates that you pay huge fees (I think about a quarter million) to receive any rating. If you don't comply, you are only allowed to be listed as "Unrated" which parents will assume means adult content. Someone actually made an entire documentary film about this one topic, and how it basically puts the entire industry at the mercy of this small group of people that watches movies for 250k per viewing. It's not actually a great situation, but so far the story is that people who make a million dollars a day with no expenses have really great lawyers, and they are kind of a legacy institution, like the power companies. A protected monopoly with no responsibilities to anyone. It's said that they get bribes from studios to hold up competitors movies, but there is never any proof. A studio film cannot go to market without their stamp.

 

[James Rogers]

I haven't looked into C.A.R.A. for many years but I don't remember it being that expensive. Besides, except for theatrical releases, who gives a damn about the traditional rating system any longer? Now, I don't know what it's called but at the beginning of films being streamed they simply give a disclaimer that the film has 'violence, drinking, sex, ass scratching...'.

 

[Nate North]

Here's something to sink you teeth into.
The Horror Report

Published 2017. A little bit dated but still, a comprehensive look at movie trends and why horror films are as close to a safe bet for Indie film makers as we can hope for.

Horror and Family have kind of held this spot for 30 years. Horror films don't need movie stars, and they don't need as much lighting because it's dark all the time. I've read a hundred articles about it over a decade and a half, and basically the reason horror movies succeed so often for indies is because filming everything wrong actually makes the movie more frightening. Can't get the subject in frame or in focus? You're cleverly baiting the audience with psychological horror. Lights too cheap to even see whats going on? You're a master director who knows how to ramp up fear with your articulate use of shadows. No stedicam and you just ran down the hall drunk following the actor? You're a consumate student of the french new wave, exploiting the powerful effects of cinema verite to immerse your audience into the films world. Teen horror is the bobsledding of the filmmaking world. You just buckle in and slide downhill.

Also lots of die hard audiences for cheap horror, specialty magazines, conventions, etc. It's cheap, it's fun, and it kind of works.

 

[Nate North]

I haven't looked into C.A.R.A. for many years but I don't remember it being that expensive. Besides, except for theatrical releases, who gives a damn about the traditional rating system any longer? Now, I don't know what it's called but at the beginning of films being streamed they simply give a disclaimer that the film has 'violence, drinking, sex, ass scratching...'.

There are workarounds like that. It's just that streaming services often block kids from watching unrated category films (it's just a script that files things by a variable) so it might not appear in their que at all. Maybe that's changed, I haven't looked into it for a few years. Netflix has been making substantial changes, as it became too large to need approval from anyone.

It you got it onto a cable channel, you could probably get a family slot once people at the channel had screened it. The issue with animation stuff is that mostly kids watch it. There is now a pretty big market for adult animation, I don't mean pornographic stuff, I just mean animated shows not intended for kids. I suspect that will end up being my main demo. It's niche, but competition is still within reason, and I think I have hit quality minimums for a smaller network already, if I can follow through with a market ready product people enjoy.