Making a Short Movie: The Story

Whatever kind of short movie you’re making, you need to think about your story and how you’ll tell it.

Josh Soskin’s short Milk Run tells an engaging story in less than three minutes. It starts with a mystery, maintains the interest, and lets the audience use their imagination.

Keep it short

When you start making movies, it’s important to keep them short. Shorter than you think. Build your storytelling skills before you go on to create longer films. They take much more time to do properly, and it’s harder to structure them and keep your viewers interested.

Short film tips

Grab the viewer’s attention from the start
Keep them interested: move the story on, keep the pace up
Only include what you have to: leave out anything that doesn’t help tell the story
Keep it simple: one story, one or two places, one or two characters
Show, don’t tell: use images, sound and editing rather than dialogue
Get the audience to use their imagination: you don’t have to spell out everything

Starting your movie

If your movie’s an online video, you only have a few seconds to capture your viewers’ attention. You can do this by a combination of

using really good or unusual camerawork
using evocative music or sound
showing something intriguing before you reveal what it is
making it obvious that the story’s about interesting people, places or things

Story structure

You could follow the story structure that you might see in a feature film, with a beginning, middle and end. There’s a setup, where you introduce the characters and the situation, then add a challenge or problem; the confrontation, where the challenges increase; and the resolution, where the story builds to a climax.

If you’re making a very short movie you don’t necessarily need to follow this: you can rely on an interesting or unusual approach, or you can show a small slice of life that the viewer understands is part of a longer story.

Be wary of twists

Many beginner filmmakers come up with a clever story idea that relies on surprising the audience with a twist or reveal. That can work, but not on its own: your story needs to be interesting and engaging all the way through, not just at the end.

Fiction story ideas

Find an interesting place and work out what kind of story you could tell there
Film a day in the life
Take a character on a journey
Start at the end: think of a good way to end your movie then work backwards.
Take a news photo or headline as a starting point: what events led up to it?
Find a single prop or object and base your story on it
Find three objects and work out a story that would connect them
Set a story in a confined space (a lift/elevator, a small room)
Base a story on an overheard conversation
Retell a family story or a local legend
Clash or combine genres (Alien is a horror movie set in space)

You could start with a story everyone knows, and tell it in a different way:

Change the point of view: Red Riding Hood from the viewpoint of the wolf or the woodcutter
Change the form: Goldilocks as a documentary or news story
Change the period or the place: O Brother Where Art Thou? is Homer’s Odyssey relocated to 1920s America
Add a character from a different genre, story, place or period.

More ideas, inspirations and examples