Screening Your Next Short Film

So you’ve finished your short film. Congratulations! Now what..? Sure you can show it to friends and family, or put it online, but does that ever feel anticlimactic? I recently helped to organise a short film night at a Film Society, where friends and strangers could see my work and the work of so many others. In this blog, I will be recounting my attempts so far to make an event out of my short films.

The Stuck Up Film Festival (2022)

Picture this scene: Stuck Up Films had recently been founded and had started acting as a portfolio for me, and the two former members. We had all finished our College A Level courses in Film and Media and had a range of short films and mock advertisements. My mind immediately rushed to ways to release this as some sort of event.

Our plans were once quite ambitious. We planned to use a studio and have interview segments between the films, in which we would be able to discuss them and crack some jokes. We were inspired by televised ceremonies such as the Oscars and wanted to give the event a feeling of prestige and glamour.

However the other two then-members were not fond of the effort required of this, so I scaled back our ambitions to instead be a single video presentation, which could premiere live on YouTube. It featured three short films, broken up by two miniature advertising campaigns. When you combine this with some triumphant music and titles, I quickly became proud of what I had spent most of the previous year making.

One of the first decisions I had to make was the order of the programme. We started with a comedy film, moved into my animation film, and then ended on a thriller film. In half of the adverts, we had Alex Wilson as a beauty model / faux celebrity. These adverts end with Alex entering his house, surrounded by paparazzi. The final film of the bunch then picks up with Alex inside the house, in a short film about surveillance and paranoia. While this was not an intentional connection at the time of production (simply a consequence of someone working with the same actors and location) we were able to imply a deeper narrative through the programming itself.

And in 20 minutes, the whole event was over. It was streamed in poor quality due to the other two members only sending me the files for their films very late in the process, so YouTube did not have the time to process the stream in high definition before it began. There was room for improvement and plans to make it bigger and better the following year, but they didn’t materialise.

SHU Film Society Student Film Night (2024)

Late last year I became a secretary for the SHU Film Society. I hold a unique position in that I am the only committee member who studies and has a background in film, so I have all the insider knowledge on the briefs that are studied and the films that have been made. The idea to run a student short film night preceded me, but I pushed for it and took organising it into my own hands.

The Film Society uses the university’s cinema, the Void Theatre. So that was our location sorted and it would mark the first time that I and many others would be able to see our work on the big screen. We screened 19 films over 95 minutes, and we did not have to reject a single submission. In some cases, we swapped one submission out for another by the same filmmaker, but we managed to get a good variety. 

The programme was separated into four sections. The first “Past and Future” saw two archive films from the university during the 1960s and 1970s, and a world premiere. These archive films were brought to our attention by the Club Exhibit society and they helped to give the night a larger scale and to show a comparison of student work decades apart. The remaining three sections represented the three strands that film students at the university can choose to study: Drama, Documentary, and Experimental.

I was lucky to see two of my films, Etna (2023) and The Church in Bidston (2023) screened. When seeing these on the big screen, I lost any sense of doubt or self-criticism, and I felt purely proud of the work that I had done. I am very grateful to this event for that experience. We were even privileged to acquire films which had previously screened at Showroom Shorts and Aesthetica Film Festival, with those filmmakers in attendance! For a selection of some of the films from the night, click here.

Finally, as promotion for the event, and as something to play at the start of the evening, I edited together a trailer. I’ve had some experience by now in editing short film trailers. Generally, you have a few minutes of footage to work with, and you bring together the best-looking shots and call it a day. I oversimplify it a lot of course, but it was much simpler than editing the trailer for this night.

Instead, I had an hour and a half of footage to edit from. I used the same process, scanning through each film from the programme and selecting the best 1 or 2 shots. It was only when I saw them all on a timeline that I realised that I could edit them to flow with a connective tissue. Each shot has some kind of cognitive or felt connection to the following shot, which allows the trailer itself to feel like a journey. Feel free to watch it and see if you can pick these details out!

Future Hopes and Plans

Seeing my work on the big screen has reminded me of the future of my work. All too many filmmakers simply move on to the next project without much consideration for the distribution of the current film. I will certainly be submitting future Stuck Up Films productions into consideration for future screenings and festivals. The FilmSoc student night was also such a success for us, that we are sure that it will be something that we hold multiple times a year from now on, as more student films become available.

- Mitchell