How to fit 8 years into a short film....HELP

J

Jgrec

New member
I am hoping for some suggestions on fitting an 8 year period of someones life into a short film I plan on writing/filming/directing without leaving out too much information but also making it smooth and understandable. This will be my first film script. Any suggestions will help, I have never gone to school for this so there might be a special technique that someone educated could let me in on. Thanks.
 
What events in these 8 years are you trying to fit into your short? Also, why does it have to be 8 years as opposed to 8 days or 8 weeks or 8 hours?

-JMT
 
I've written about 14 feature scripts over the years and i don't know how to begin to answer a question like that? Feel free to pm if you can be more specific.
best
kb
 
Short films should have pretty basic concepts; not much room for meandering. If you're meaning to cover 8 years, does it all center around the same thing? If not, perhaps it's not really material appropriate for a short.
 
Well, the short answer is, you can't. If you want to 'fit' 8 years of someone's life, it will, I assure you, be very, very, boring. It will mean something only to you, but we as an audience are not as invested in that life as you seem to be. Without even knowing anything else about your intentions, I'm absolutely positive that this is the case. And we're not even talking about long form...

So don't do that.

Or, don't approach the story like that... you could either make it like a visual 'poem' as many TV commercials do... You have to be very creative in your approach to telling that story, and if you haven't written anything before, my guess is that you won't be able to pull this off. Don't want to be negative about this, just a little reality check...
 
There was an interesting Vimeo video a couple years back where a girl condensed an entire year of her life into this quickly flashing psychadelic film. Can't remember the name. It was pretty good, and I think it placed highly in one of their contests or best of lists or something. You can try and find that.

But honestly -- what's so interesting about these 8 years that anyone would care? Why not just pick a few interesting tidbits and make an original story?
 
I understand that you as an audience are not as invested in this persons life as much as I am from the beginning but isn't that the point of a film is to capture the audience and make them feel instantly like they care about what is happening in the film. I feel like lots of great films that i've watched were at one point only "something" to very few people in the beginning but then through watching it became much more to many people. And I promise this story will be far from boring. Thanks for all that have commented so far! I wish I could be more specific in describing my ideas on this film but I'm still trying to figure out how to write it. It will be a story more or less of a relationship between two people, ups and downs, over an 8 year period, that has now ended. Maybe just stick to monumental points over those 8 years, I really like the visual poem idea!
 
Jgrec said:
I understand that you as an audience are not as invested in this persons life as much as I am from the beginning but isn't that the point of a film is to capture the audience and make them feel instantly like they care about what is happening in the film. I feel like lots of great films that i've watched were at one point only "something" to very few people in the beginning but then through watching it became much more to many people. And I promise this story will be far from boring. Thanks for all that have commented so far! I wish I could be more specific in describing my ideas on this film but I'm still trying to figure out how to write it. It will be a story more or less of a relationship between two people, ups and downs, over an 8 year period, that has now ended. Maybe just stick to monumental points over those 8 years, I really like the visual poem idea!
Click to expand...

Watch Blue Valentine.
 
One issue you'll need to address is how to show time passing - if a year has passed between two shots, how will the audience know that? this same issue has been discussed several times before here, both in the writing and directing forums.
 
I would suggest against it.

As this is your first script, I would recommend revisiting why you need to tell this particular story this way in the first place. Chances are your story does not really revolve around the passage of time - which is a gimmick, not a story - but is really about a character or characters.

In order to avoid potential heartache of changing your story's idea, shelve it and start a new short that is one-character-centric.

Everyone starts out writing massive "shorts." I did. Writing shorts is hard - some may say harder than writing features. Every second - every word in a script even - counts for tons in a short. Make it short, make it watchable!

I'm really only speaking of standard narratives, though. An experimental piece that shows 8 years passing in an elegant way, as others mentioned in a previous post, could be very enjoyable, but it probably won't be your basic dialogue-driven narrative. And there's nothing wrong with that.
 
I suggest you watch the opening minutes of the Pixar film UP. They cover even more than 8 years and it's beautiful.
 
Jgrec said:
I understand that you as an audience are not as invested in this persons life as much as I am from the beginning but isn't that the point of a film is to capture the audience and make them feel instantly like they care about what is happening in the film. I feel like lots of great films that i've watched were at one point only "something" to very few people in the beginning but then through watching it became much more to many people. And I promise this story will be far from boring. Thanks for all that have commented so far! I wish I could be more specific in describing my ideas on this film but I'm still trying to figure out how to write it. It will be a story more or less of a relationship between two people, ups and downs, over an 8 year period, that has now ended. Maybe just stick to monumental points over those 8 years, I really like the visual poem idea!
Click to expand...

It's going to be difficult to make it work if it's not about a specific thing. If it's just a string of anecdotes about a relationship with no particular point, it's going to be pretty hard to get people to care.
 
Nuno Dias said:
Sure it is. But that in itself means very little... it works within the context of the rest of the film.
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I completely disagree with you.
They could have had the wife die and he open the adventure book and see all the happy pictures of their life together and the line "Thanks for the adventure now go have a new one- love ellie" and fade to black
and it would have been just as amazing.
 
Rippie said:
I completely disagree with you.
They could have had the wife die and he open the adventure book and see all the happy pictures of their life together and the line "Thanks for the adventure now go have a new one- love ellie" and fade to black
and it would have been just as amazing.
Click to expand...

Sure, I understand that. But for me, that would be very lame and pretentious, not to mention boring. Melodramatic sentimentalism is not what I love to see in the movies. But that's just me.

Again, I'm not trying to dissuade the original poster, but films about personal relationships tend to be very pretentious, and usually fall into the trap of mistaking drama for personal investment in their life together. Keep that in the photo book, and in your memory, where it belongs, seriously...
 
Nuno Dias said:
films about personal relationships tend to be very pretentious, and usually fall into the trap of mistaking drama for personal investment in their life together. Keep that in the photo book, and in your memory, where it belongs, seriously...
Click to expand...

Those kinds of stories have been known to succeed pretty well on occasion though, like for example:

Romeo And Juliet
Gone With The Wind
West Side Story
Titanic

...and I'm sure there must be a couple others : )
 
Dangerous ground in a short though because if I don't care about the people (which takes time, like the first third of the script) then I won't care about their relationship.
 
Zak Forsman did a very nice short a while back about a guy and a girl that had almost no dialog but was quite powerful in its subtext. I forget the name now...involved an old coffee cup (or something like that) the guy had that reminded him of their past. Perhaps Zak or someone else will chime in and refresh my memory...

Almost any genre can be done well...if it's done well... : )
 
Regarding an 8 year time span in a short, I think it's quite doable if...well...see above...

There was a very clever TV commercial a couple years ago, a :30 I think, that had a guy seeing a beautiful girl in an elevator and then flashing forward in super-quick cuts through his fantasy of their future together including marriage, kids, old age...their whole lives. It required the super quick cuts to work of course, and it was comedic, but it did manage to convey about 50 years of (hypothetical) life in less than half a minute. So it can be done. It's just a matter of figuring out if it can be done in a way that works effectively within the framework of a specific storytelling/movie 'world'.
 
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