National Short Film Day

The Shortest Day, the Shortest Form

Putting National Short Film Day on the winter solstice is a small joke that works.

Short films don’t get the respect they deserve. People treat them as rehearsals for a real movie, when the good ones are finished works that plenty of features never match.

A short film tells a complete story in a few minutes instead of two hours.

That sounds easier than a feature. It’s harder. A feature has room to breathe, to set up slowly, to recover from a weak stretch. A short has none of that. Every second has to justify itself, and there’s nowhere for weak craft to hide. The form is pure compression, and compression is the hardest thing in storytelling.

I review movies, over a thousand of them by now, cataloged by genre on my other site. The shorts are a different discipline entirely. A great short does in five minutes what a bad feature fails to do in two hours, and that gap teaches you something about how stories work.

The shorts that disappoint me most play like the first ten minutes of a feature that never got made. A short has to finish. If all it does is set something up, it’s wasted my time and the filmmaker’s budget.

Watch: The Wait - 1 Minute Short Film | Award Winning, Morphine

Where Directors Are Born

The short film is where most filmmakers start, and there’s a reason for that beyond money.

A short is cheap enough to make. That matters when you have no budget and no studio. But it’s also the purest training ground for craft. With no room for filler, a new director learns fast what works and what doesn’t. You can’t coast on a big star or a special effect for five minutes. You either tell the story cleanly or you don’t. Almost every director you admire cut their teeth on shorts, and the discipline shows up in their later work.

That’s the value of the form even for viewers. A short shows you craft stripped down to its essentials. No bloat, no padding, no studio committee softening the edges. Just a story told as efficiently as it can be told.

I trust a director more when there’s a good five-minute film somewhere in their past. It proves they can tell a story with nothing to hide behind, and that shows up later in how they handle a two-hour one.

What a Writer Steals from the Short Film

The short film matters to me as a writer because it’s a model of compression, and compression is the skill most writers lack.

Most writing is too long. Too many words, too much setup, too much explaining. The short film can’t afford any of that, and watching how a good one works teaches you to cut. Every scene does a job. Every image matters. Nothing is there to fill time. That’s exactly how good prose works too, and seeing it done in film makes the lesson concrete.

This is where I’d send any writer whose drafts keep bloating. A filmmaker who cuts a whole backstory down to one glance teaches more about economy than another lecture about adverbs ever will.

If you want to study tight storytelling, the short form is an excellent teacher. It’s the same lesson I take from the films every fiction writer should study, just concentrated. Learn to tell a complete story with nothing wasted, and your writing gets sharper in every form.

How do you spend National Short Film Day?

Watch some short films. That has never been easier. Festivals, streaming platforms, and the whole internet are full of them, and many of the best are free.

Watch a few back to back and pay attention to how fast they establish a character, a world, and a stakes.

Notice how a great short makes you feel something complete in the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee. If you write, ask how it did that, because the answer is compression, and compression is a skill you can steal. Browse my movie reviews for the longer form too, then spend the shortest day of the year on the shortest stories film can tell.

The shortest day of the year is a good excuse, and I’d take it. Give a few of these films the attention you’d give a feature, and I think you’ll come away wondering why so many two-hour movies needed the extra hour and fifty minutes.

National Short Film Day FAQ