Media Studies: Thrillers and Short Films

Now that I have a good understanding of the basic conventions of Thriller films, I thought it would be best to be able to now focus on how thrillers are portrayed in short films and whether or not they have the same success. For example, it may be a lot easier to build up tension over a couple of hours compared to say, five minutes.

Building Suspense

Some would argue it is very difficult to build and maintain suspense in a short film, in my opinion I think this is quite the contrary, Building suspense can be done extremely quickly, for example the anticipation of climax in the film "Gravity" is easily established right up to the peak moment when the woman is detatched and sent off into space. The actual moment from suspense to climax is around one minute, which makes this entirely poosible to apply into a short film.


So, how can we produce a quality short film of this genre?

A website that mainly displays short films, known as "Short of the Week", has a section dedicated to short films submitted that were of the Thriller genre. The site can be found here. It can be seen that a lot of the films are all more than five minutes long, which is something we cant afford to do in our own sequence (five minutes).

Taking into consideration of the disadvantage of having to convey these aspects of the genre into a short sequence, I think it will be a challenge. However, the research we have made into short films and thrillers so far can help us to place into our film as much of the general conventions of Thrillers as possible in this time limit. As well as this, the lack of time should not make a difference, this is because we're not trying to make a feature length film, we're just trying to apply the themes of the genre into our short film effectively in the time we have  Its not quantity, its quality, after all.

Another point to make is it has been done before, there have been numerous Thriller short films made very well and ended up being successful. One example of which would be "The Open Door", this film was directed and produced by a single person and ended up winning an award at the National Student Film Festival.



In conclusion I believe that many shot thriller films are both successful and entertaining, whether or not our film can do the same is down to us. Looking at our Storyline I believe the best option for us would be to adapt our film and conjoin with another genre or use a sub genre, for example a Thriller-Drama.