Life and the Short Film

The problem with making narrative short film is always one of how do you find your audience? With the current glut of online video content portals to choose from, how do you an already overloaded audience to take you seriously enough to commit the 10-30 minutes to watch a dramatic short that has no star power or media buzz?

One approach is the anthology feature film - a 90 minute film constructed from a collection of short films, connected by a common theme. "Paris, Je T'aime" is an intriguing example, where each short film takes place in a different district of the city of Paris, geography connecting each disparate story.

My initial intention for the afilmabout.us project was to create an anthology feature - the body of work would carry more weight at feature length, it would be easier to program at festivals, and it was a measurable goal for the people working on the projects. The problem was that the shorts I was making didn't have a consistent theme. I never found a satisfactory way of dealing with that, and so I let the idea slide. Besides, I had plenty of other things to worry about.

And then last month I was invited to see an anthology feature project that had an innovative solution...



The Wonder Project is the brainchild of the participants of the DnA group (short for "Directors and Actors"), a weekly workshop for storytellers who collaborate to develop their craft. In her article for Filmmaker Magazine, Wonder Project episode director Shari Carpenter explains how the film is comprised of shorts that use the same lines of dialog. In an exercise similar to one featured in the televised filmmaking competition "Project Greenlight," all the directors participating in The Wonder Project were given the same blank script - dialog without any stage direction or scene information - and an entirely free hand to interpret the circumstances of the script and how the lines were delivered. Suddenly you have both a rigorous structure to build an anthology around, and an unfettered creative canvas onto which each director can paint their distinct narrative vision.

DnA director and Wonder Project instigator Dutch Doscher invited me to a lock screening of the Wonder Project last month at Planet Hollywood Time Square, in large part because I'm an outspoken advocate of short film on Twitter (which is how I met Dutch in the first place). I was invited as a blogger, but I was concerned that perhaps I was there under false pretenses - I mean I blog, but I'm not a committed blogger (which you've already noticed if you've spent any time reading this site). Plus I've never reviewed an unreleased film before - a delicate task for someone as opinionated as myself... Regardless, as a filmmaker I was definitely curious to see what Dutch and his partners had done with this short film anthology format. What follows are my entirely subjective reactions to that screening:



The blank script structure was set up with the opening title animation - a brisk overview of all the lines in the blank script as they are both read aloud and projected onto the screen. To paraphrase Shakespeare, the words are the thing. The first two shorts, a couple breaking into a lakeside summer home in "Lake Wonderful," and a psychotic love relationship imploding on the sidewalk in "Wonder/Love," lead the audience into pretty traditional short territory, and set the tone and expectations for this micro-budget production. The third, "Wonder of See Saws," where two couples eating at the same restaurant get into an argument, shows real flair and humor, and segues into the dark and dense "Wondering Darkness," a Chris Cunningham-esque vignette about people trapped in a behavioral study gone wrong - subjects and researchers alike. All four of these shorts attempt story arc and character development, which for me, to be honest, is when short film works best.

"Wonderlust," on the other hand, is something of a shaggy dog story - a visual gag that zips through the blank script so fast the film barely makes an impression. This is followed by the equally light "The Cats of Wonder" - a frothy film that sets two cats with questionable French accents (read Pepe La Pew) as the protagonists. It doesn't last long enough to outstay its welcome. However in the next short it's speed, or rather haste, that is the fatal flaw. "Will of Wonder" focuses on a patient's pivotal visit to his psychologist's office, but the short races through the psychological twists and turns in such a way that defangs the effectiveness of the piece and left me wishing we'd spent more time with the characters.



By now, of course, the pattern of dialog has been made abundantly clear to the audience - the repetition of the lines ceases to be intrusive and becomes the real pleasure of the piece: How will this line be read? How will they fit in that line? A palpable sense of anticipation is created that genuinely ties these films together.

The last two shorts highlight both the strengths and the weaknesses of this project - "The Wondrous Bliss" falls flat for me when we're asked to believe the two young, good-looking and well-groomed actors are supposed to be heroin junkies driven to steal in order to feed their habit... Having recently watched "The Wire" on DVD this conceit really tested my credulity, even though the performances were wonderful - Margaret Donlin in particular.



The last short, "Eye Wonder," on the other hand, was the strongest of the bunch - a love triangle that is revealed when a young man takes one lover to a tarot reading and is horrified to discover his other lover is the card reader. Where the previous shorts felt in some way unbalanced - performances that are stronger that the interpretation of the script, or ideas that needed more development before being committed to camera - this short showed a thoroughness of execution that becomes the keystone to the entire project. If you end strong, I've always said, the audience will forgive you just about everything. This is most definitely a strong ending.

Like I told Dutch, the unevenness of these shorts works in a way that means no one piece overshadows the others, creating a truly complementary anthology with a strong connective vision. I'm told there is likely to be a re-structuring of these shorts - removing the literary quotes that appeared between the shorts in the edit I saw, and re-ordering the sequence the shorts appear in. I can't say how these changes will affect the piece, I can only say that I liked the anthology as it was presented that night and found it to be very effective.



In the end I absolutely admire the ambitions of this project. I'm a dedicated short film advocate, but the truth is that, instead of being easier to get shorts seen, new technology is making it harder for a single short to find any kind of audience. With so many outlets to see videos of all shapes and sizes, unsupported short film releases are getting drowned in the online video deluge. What The Wonder Project offers is a workable paradigm for emerging artists, to pool their resources collaboratively and build a means for experimental short-form content to find a larger audience.