What is a 'short'?

Our task it to make a short film, but what exactly is a short?

Short film is a technical description originally coined in the North American film industry in the early period of cinema.

Although the North American definition generally refers to films between 20 and 40 minutes, the definition refers to much shorter films in Europe, Latin America and Australasia. In New Zealand, for instance, the description can be used to describe any film that has a duration longer than one minute and shorter than 15 minutes. The North American definition also tends to focus much more on character whereas the European and Australasian forms tend to depend much more on visual drama and plot twists.

Since the 1980s, the term "short subject" has come to be used interchangeably with "short film," an international, academic term used to mean a contemporary non-commercial motion picture that is substantially shorter than the average commercial feature film. There is no clear definition of the maximum length of a short film, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences classify it as 40 minutes, while the Internet Movie Database refers to any film lasting less than 45 minutes as a short subject. The short-film form is to the full-length film what the short story is to a full-fledged novel.

Short films often focus on difficult topics which longer, more commercial films usually avoid. Filmmakers benefit from larger freedoms and can take higher risks, but they must rely on festival and art house exhibition to achieve public display. Most short films are better known outside the United States than within, due to less rigidity of audience expectation as to program content, arrangement and length outside the U.S.

Short filmmaking is also growing in popularity among amateurs and enthusiasts, who are taking advantage of affordable equipment. "Prosumer" or semi-professional cameras now cost under £3000, and free or low-cost software is widely available that is capable of video editing, post-production work and DVD authoring.

Very short films are sometimes considered as a category of their own. They are the film equivalent of microfiction, like the 60 Word Story. The International Festival of Very Shorts is a festival based in Paris which shows only films less than three minutes long. Filminute, the international one-minute film festival, has presented and promoted a collection of one-minute films across multiple media since September 2006.

Such films can also be easily distributed via the Internet; Across the Hall, for example, was solely distributed on the Internet. Certain websites which encourage the submission of user-created short films, such as YouTube, Openfilm, BritFilms and Newgrounds have attracted large communities of artists and viewers, whereas sites such as BBC Film Network focus on showcasing curated British shorts.