(Limelight). The Complete Guide to Writing, Producing, and Directing a Low-Budget Short Film is a comprehensive step-by-step overview of how to complete and promote a low-budget short film. It begins with how to write a short script, keeping in mind the goal of shooting it in one or at most two days. It discusses how to finalize your script by getting feedback and then preparing it for production through doing a scene breakdown and possibly a storyboard. It describes how to direct the film yourself or work with a director, audition the actors and cast the short, plan for and participate in the shoot, and work with an editor to finish your film. Finally, it discusses how to get your film shown, including entering it in festivals, and concludes with an extensive list of resources and references, including books, articles, script and storyboard software, conferences, expos, festivals, and more.

Producing and Directing the Short Film and Video is the definitive book on the subject for beginning filmmakers and students. The book clearly illustrates all of the steps involved in preproduction, production, postproduction, and distribution. Its unique two-fold approach looks at filmmaking from the perspectives of both producer and director, and explains how their separate energies must combine to create a successful short film or video, from script to final product. This guide offers extensive examples from award-winning shorts and includes insightful quotes from the filmmakers themselves describing the problems they encountered and how they solved them. The companion website contains useful forms and information on grants and financing sources, distributors, film and video festivals, film schools, internet sources for short works, and professional associations.

It's a comprehensive step-by-step overview of how to complete a low-budget short film and get it shown. It discusses how to write a short script, prepare it for production with a scene breakdown or storyboard, direct the film or work with a director, audition and cast the actors, participate in the shoot, work with an editor, and promote your film.

Making movies is the most exciting way to earn a living and it is not surprising that media and film studies remain the most popular courses at colleges across the western world. A short film provides an opportunity for elliptical, poetic, condensed story telling. Shorts can take risks rarely seen in features. It is the arena where a strong voice or individual vision is possible; an invitation for experimentation and originality. Making Short Films, 3rd edition is entirely revised and restructured, providing a much more complete and detailed guide to filmmaking, with more information on new technology, illustrations and ideas for best practice.

Most books about film production assume that you have an idea and a script to shoot. Most screenwriting books are geared to how to write a script that you can sell to Hollywood (as though the authors of these books had the slightest clue) and do not take into consideration that you might be shooting the script yourself, possibly with your own money. This book is about how to write a script properly that you can rationally shoot, how to shoot it, how to finish it, how to sell it, and also how to get it shown.

Anyone can make a short film, right? Just grab some friends and your handheld and you can do it in a weekend or two before being accepted to a slew of film festivals, right? Wrong. Roberta Munroe screened short film submissions at Sundance for five years, and is an award-winning short filmmaker in her own right. So she knows a thing or two about how not to make a short film. From the first draft of your script to casting, production, editing, and distribution, this is your one-stop primer for breaking into the business. Featuring interviews with many of today's most talented writers, producers, and directors, as well as revealing stories (e.g., what to do when the skinhead crack addict next door begins screaming obscenities as soon as you call "action") from the sets of her own short films, Roberta walks you through the minefield of mistakes that an aspiring filmmaker can make--so that you don't have to make them yourself.

Whether you are embarking on your first YouTube project or planning a more ambitious, collaborative film, Making Short Films give you the answers for everything you need to know. This new edition of what has become a bible for filmmakers internationally is completely rewritten, expanded and redesigned and now features a web-page with supporting information and access to the key films discussed inside. Just as the original, descriptions and explanations of the whole process to making a film is given as well as insider tips from producers and film makers. All the history of short-film-making, all the criteria about putting together a script, how to direct, securing funding and getting your short shown are packed into this must have for filmmakers of all types.