Main codes and conventions trailers/short film

What is a short film?
A short film is any film which is not your standard feature film, which is normally 90 - 120 minutes. According to the academy of motion picture arts and sciences they define a short film as 'an original motion picture that has the running time of 40 minutes or less. There are two types of short films, professional or amateur. Short films are usually screened at local, national or international film festivals. A lot of people create short films for any profit, but just for fun. At times they might have a low budget, or if they are sponsored they might have certain things for there income that goes towards the films.

The most popular type of short films were comedy, there any many funny faces of the short film world such as Charlie Chaplin or laurel and hardy, etc.

These big names made short films really popular, but in todays world people forget about short films because they are shadowed by normal featured films. Hopefully big film companies such as Pixar, DreamWorks and Warner Brothers are trying to bring back short films, but they are going to feature mainly animation short films, because they think with todays modern era people would enjoy animated short films more due to the society with live in.


The main thing to understand when making a short film/trailer is that to understand what is the purpose of their job. so by re searching on what there job is, here is what i have concluded in a short paragraph of what there purpose is:

As because a trailer/short film is pronounced before the actual film is out. The purpose of the trailer/short film is that it gives the audience a advertisement or you could say a commercial for the actual film that will be announced release. 

What a trailer consist of is that a collectible of shots are made into a short 2-3 minute preview of the film. the purpose for this is that it attracts the audience even more to go and watch the film, it is like a tease, because you have viewed only a little bit of the film, you are most likely if interested want to view the whole film to see what happens at the end. an important technique that they use in trailers is that they always depending on the genre of the film would show the parts that would attract the audience to watch the film, for e.g if it is horror film the people who create the trailers would then pick from the film the scariest parts of the film a put them together to build the 2-3 minute montage of all the scariest parts. the plan is to that because they are showing the scariest parts of the film this would then draw the audience to film even more, because then the audience is most likely to think what is going to happen in that film. 

What are the main codes and conventions that are used in a short film? 

. film production logos

. film title 

. directors name/produce name

. age certification 

. actors involved 

. music 

. release date

. last up to 5-40 minutes (depends on film)