You prob. heard about expression short but sweet! According to many
aspects of new technology, it has never been easier than it is now
to produce a low-budget short feature film. Short features are far cheaper then
a feature film, plus such film has a great possibility to become a masterpiece
and to make a great breakthrough for any filmmaker today. The media talks all
the time about great success stories of little films that made out pretty well,
and about opportunities for film directors to find audiences and find a way
through a new distribution models via
DVD, and this is why short films works out just fine. Shorts
are a calling card and a good teritory, and for individual always-great
success but with advances in low-cost digital production, creativity with
editing equipment, artistic freedom etc… A short film is any film not long enough to be a feature film. Here there
are no boundary drawn and I underline no boundary drawn. The Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences defines a short film as "an original motion picture that has a
running time of 40 minutes or less, including all credits." Short
films can be professional indeed, often screened at local or international film
festivals and directed by independent film directors, with either a low budget
or no budget at all.
In Serbia, most of
filmmakers celebrate short film, because that is the only way to express what
they want and say, whatever there is to be said and to make a great impact. I
am presenting you well known Serbian film director specializing for short film, Marko Kostić. Marko
Kostić, Belgrade-based filmmaker, critic, essayist and winner of many
international and domestic awards for children's film Princ od papira (The Prince of Paper), was recently appointed
to the Commission regarding competition Serbian Film Centre (FSC) for the
allocation of funds for co-production of domestic feature films. His latest
film Mašinica(The Gadget) showed at the Festival of Documentary and Short Film in Belgrade 2012 www.kratkimetar.rs represents a sustainable continuity from the
previous short film, Princ od papira
(The Prince of Paper). Short film Mašinica (The Gadget), done in Luxfilm Production and written by Vladislava Vojnović has an ironic detachment from reality, which
provide, by the words of the director, the distance in director's approach to a
filmmaking. The film shows the average Belgrade family struggling with the
reality of hard every day life and constant lack of money on their own way with
humor. This is short and effective film and filmmaker Marko Kostić is a representative of the minor number of filmmaker’s generation who are URBAN and stable enough,
incorruptible and unwavering by various different influences, which is very hard to achieve due to a
venal nature of the job. In
trying to define short film, we
automatically face the dilemma that, there are no
precise criteria or characteristics that apply to all short films. Still
it is
hard to make effective short film: analogies from the world of
literature are
also not very good idea, because the short story is often too short for
literature work. Deductions based on the poetics, dramaturgy of short
film
is helpful and can be applied with some success, and that is why it is
good
that Mašinica (The Gadget) is a
short film. Any longer feature would just spoil the story and turn it to a
tiresome feature depressive drama. After all, many a
successful, award-winning short filmmaker has faded to obscurity after
following a dream of making a first feature that failed to achieve the
filmmaker’s goal. While short films are always Indy, always cool and always
artistic enough to stay.
More about Marko Kostić in the following interview in the next article Spider Spider:
