The Power Of Six Minutes

The other day a friend of mine and I were talking about a brunch of silly things, trying to make sense out of some aspects of life; and I don't know how the conversation turned to filmmaking, particularly "short films", but it happened. As a short film junky, I was a bit surprised when my friend told me she did not know that filmmakers also work hard to make this type of films that only last few minutes. I first started to educate her on the subject - teaching her the different aspects of it; and then, I did what every good teacher would do, I had her experience it. In fact, we went online and watched three or four shorts for a total of about twenty minutes. We had some reactions about the different stories. We had questions with no clear answers. That was it.




Two days later, the episode came back to my mind. So, I decided to watch few more shorts. I turned on my computer and sat back for a ride in the world of quick magic. I watched the first one, a second, a third, and by the time the forth came on, I was already in the deepest zone of my thoughts. I knew that films were powerful. Now, I realized that short films could sometimes hit with a bigger punch! It is so easy to think that five, seven or ten minutes of film cannot be that hard to make. Usually, the budget is not a fortune, the actors are not crazy A-listers, the set is no hell on earth and the list goes on... However, when you really look at "shorts" you will find out that they are very complex and sometimes even more difficult to make. If in a feature lenght you have room and time for unworthy dialogues, holding back actions, unnecessary material (don't add these to your film even if it's feature), fortunately, you don't have the privilege (?) to do that in a nine-minute film. You have a story: you tell it and you tell it well. No curves, no dancing around, no circonvolutions.




The other day, I watched "Offside", the second short in the trilogy by Erez Tadmor and Guy Nattiv regarding the Middle East conflict... and it made me think. It made me think seriously about myself as a man, about my family and friends, about humanity. In less than six minutes, it taught me one lesson. It taught me that we are human and we all should have one purpose: sharing love and happiness. To me, this short fulfilled its purpose. Isn't that what every film is aiming to do? That's why I am a filmmaker.

Note: The first piture is a scene from "Offside", a short film by Israeli filmmakers Erez Tadmor and Guy Nattiv. The second picture is a scene from Academy Award nominated short film "New Boy".

Never Knew I Had It Under My Skin Til' This Look Back

I was about eight year old when I experienced filmmaking for the very first time. This might sound silly, but believe me this is how it happened. It was summer vacation, the time all the kids of the neighborhood get together and start playing which one is the baddest either at soccer, car riding (toy), tree climbing etc. This day, I don't remember how it happened, I found myself having a stockpile of slides depicting some biblical era war. I was fascinated by the images. I took them one by one and looked intensively as if I was trying to understand something. At first, they were just distinct images... But as I was putting them together stories started to form in my mind (notice this was pure imagination as the slides were not numbered which made it difficult to know which one comes after the other). I started to see princes, generals, lands and territories. I saw soldiers leaving their families, battle fields, conquests etc. All that in my eight years old head. I enjoyed it! And suddenly, I wanted to share my discovery with my friends. I wanted to tell them the story I just saw; however, I wanted this to be in a continuous, fluid way instead of pulling slides one by one with interruptions. How could I accomplish that?



I decided to tape the slide one to the other by the egdes and make a long band of many of them. Now, I resolved the continuity problem, but I felt it lacked in magic. As the day was getting to its end, it started to get darker which to me was an inconvenience as I wanted to finish my project. So, I got a flashlight and turned it on. Accidentally, the light went straight through the slides and to my surprise big images were forming on the house wall. This is it, I thought. It was bigger than television and very captivating. But quickly, I saw a disadvantage. My images were silent. Now, my new battle was to add sound to it. It was late; so I had to wait for the next day. All night, I could not sleep. I was thinking about the story, about what each character was supposed to say, who was going to make it and who was going to die etc. It was the longest night ever. The next morning, I gathered all my friends, took a tape recorder, some kitchen utensils and I started recording.



On my parents' patio, I remade an ancient war. I spent the whole day taping and retaping the story with dialogues, warfar noises and other vivid sounds. Contrarily to the previous day, now I wanted the time to go fast so it could get dark for me to start the magic. That night, around 7, my friends and even some adults came to see "my movie". I used two of my friends to each hold an end of the slides band, another one right in the middle to hold the flash light, and me I was operating the tape recorder as the slides were passing one after the other. At the end of the show, everyone was excited. I became a filmmaker (lol)! And for the rest of the summer, I was just making films. The funny part is: I was making a different film almost each day with the same slides by just changing the sequences. Also, until this day, I never can understand how in the world I had the gut to put "Dirty Diana" of Michael Jackson as the score of all my summer war series movies. Someone tell me...