Typically, feature length action films tend to be around 2 hours long, which is actually surprisingly short in the film industry, when you consider that Titanic is 3 hours long, and Lord of the Rings: Return of the King is a whopping 3.5 hours long. So, in keeping with the idea that action films short be 'short and sweet', 5 minutes felt like the most appropriate length for our short film.
To make it any longer would have meant using longer pieces of footage, and dragging out the time until the major plot twist in the middle. I feel that this would have been risky as if we left the audience waiting for too long for the major action to happen, they would become bored and lose interest in the product.
The idea of making our product slightly shorter was also considered, but in terms of scene setting, character development, and storytelling, there simply would not have been enough time to include all the relevant footage and still have a plot line that was easy for the audience to follow. It also meant that we wouldn't have enough time to be able to build up the level of suspense that our short film lends itself to, and so the plot development towards the end of the product would be far less effective.
In order to get the product to around 5 minutes long, there were around 30 different clips, all of various lengths, used. Some of the longer clips were broken up by a series of jump cuts in order to keep the footage fast flowing (as is the norm in an action film). The idea is to use these clips to give the audience a sense of time passing, causing them to wonder where the action is taking them, which, coupled with the footage showing a progressive journey towards a destination, helps to pull the audience in, and take them on the journey. The destination, in this case, is the major plot twist revealed around 3 minutes into the product. The transitions used between the clips are mostly fading one clip into another. Again, this produces the feeling of the action happening over a period of time, and also highlights to the audience that the two different scenes set in the beginning of the film, are happening alongside each other in time.
In order to create a plot line that we could easily produce as a 5 minute short film, we applied Todorov's narrative theory. the basis for this theory follows 5 steps:
- Equilibrium - the story begins with a seemingly normal state of affairs. Everybody is happy and comfortable with their lives. (This opening is almost always a cutesy suburban household)
- Disruption/disequilibrium- the antagonist of the story (usually a villain, or a major event, such as the outbreak of a deadly virus) causes a change and disrupts the order and normality of the lives of the characters.
- Recognition- the protagonist of the story realises this change has occured. They recognise that it will be down to them to attempt to fix it. (so, it's up to them to defeat the villain, or develop a cure for the deadly virus)
- Restoring order- the protagonist undergoes the necessary steps in order to restore normality and remove the disruption caused by the antagonist. (This is where we would see the intense final showdown between the hero and the villain, or a high octane car chase to get to the source of the virus before it begins to spread)
- New Equilibrium- cue the happy ending. The protagonist will have come out victorious in whatever challenge he was attempting, and now everybody is able to sleep soundly knowing the threat from the antagonist is gone, and shouldn't return. Equilibrium is restored. However, this can be described as a new equilibrium because the characters have been on a life changing journey and have learnt some important life lessons along the way, things have returned to normal, but with a new found appreciation for normality.
below is a flow diagram detailing how the narrative of my short film coincides with Todorov's narrative theory:
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