The difficulties of telling the whole story in a few minutes...

It is difficult to tell a whole story in under 5 minutes, because you have to introduce the characters and make the audience engage with them in a short period of time, as well as telling the whole story and making it clear to the audience. In feature length films they have 2 hours to do all of these things, so trying to comprise all of these factors in a short period of time poses many difficulties.


The main difficulty is Characters engaging with the audience or "breaking fourth wall". Meaning breaking down the imaginary wall between the audience and the characters, the other 3 walls being their stage or onscreen set. Breaking the fourth wall is a metaphor for breaking down the boundaries between characters and the audience so they can fully engage and the audience can fully see into the characters life and understand what is happening not only in the characters life, but around them as well, therefore understanding a characters emotion by putting themselves in the their shoes; this is where we see the audience showing emotion to things that are sad, or laughing when they think something is funny. If you cannot engage with your audience then fundamentally they will lose interest and you will lose your audience, you have to draw them in and make them keep wanting to watch. Obviously this is hard to do when making a short film because you have a short time to do all of these things, you have to build it all into the film all the emotion that you want your audience to feel it is hard to pack humour and suspense into such a short period of time, therefore the audience would have to be fully drawn in and intrigued as to what is going to happen for then to fully engage in the piece itself.
Another problem of telling the whole story in a few minutes, is, funnily enough, telling a whole story in a few minutes. When I come to writing my script and filming, I will have to take into account how much dialogue I use and how long it will take to film each scene, as it is easy to get carried away. Last year when I made the first 2 minutes of "The Life of Emily Banks" we shot over 15 minutes of footage, which meant a lot of editing and deciding which bits we wanted to the most, and it was very difficult to cram pack everything we needed into 2 minutes. Also, there were some bits we needed at the beginning and ending of scenes, but we wanted to cut out the middle, which meant some really sharp scene transitions. So this year, I aim to be very careful with my timescales, to avoid going over my time limits, and dodgy editing.