11 Short Film Rules

The panic sets in when I put drag the footage from my talking head SD card into Adobe Premiere to start editing and it’s an hour and 30 minutes long. And it doesn’t help when the person to blame is staring right back at me from the software.

I need to start making shorter videos.

Hi, and welcome to the first newsletter I’ve ever written in my life. Feel free to literally reply and roast my punctuation/grammar skills. It’ll take me a while to work the bugs out and figure out the platform and what even is a newsletter? But most importantly it’s really nice for us to connect outside of the algorithm/platform. We’re getting serious.

After an exceptionally weird winter, lots of professional changes, and a week of 30k daily steps (I walked the last 100km of the French Way pilgrimage—a part of the famous El Camino), I’ve decided to shoot another short film.

Kicking off that production made me start thinking about the filters and guardrails I put up in my brain to make sure that what I and my team put hours into pays off for everyone, at least creatively.

Classic beginner traps like: Writing a script that would need $1 million to just build the set… Start small. Don’t write something where you can’t contribute some of the skills and labour yourself. If directing is your only skill, don’t fumble favours that will kill relationships.

Why do I bother making short films? Because it’s the magic. Making something because you can. Working with an actor to do something or say something sounds so silly, but it’s the beginning of… really saying something... If you catch my drift. *insert head explode gif*

Book yourself on a creative project.

But the best part is pulling your team together. Showing them a weird script, seeing them get excited, and creating the permission to make something weird. Something that isn’t a mayo commercial, with dad in his Old Navy quarter-zip sweater, mom, who’s 20 years younger than him, and a “clean, modern home” that is actually a $4 million home. This all works for mayo somehow.

Anyways, we’ve booked our location for next week. It’s a local church. We’re figuring out camera. Some lenses are on their way for me to test on it (i’m such an influencer). I rented the cherry picker (above). Looking for an Aputure 1200d (not that much of an influencer yet). Checking out wardrobe at the local theatre in town this evening. And I have to figure out how to make someone levitate on set. No big deal.

Thanks for reading through my first newsletter.

New video here