Ten Short Films You Don't Need To Make

PLEASE DON’T

Here’s my top ten list of short films people never need to make again:

1. Twenty something trauma in your rented flat. Drama and conflict free essays in narcissism. Sorry your girlfriend/boyfriend left you but you know what? When you get older it won’t matter. And if you put your twenty minutes of sitting in a kitchen smoking and staring into space to an indie soundtrack you deserve executing.

What a great idea for a film

2. Zombies. It used to be vampires but then it was zombies. It’s probably demons now.

3. Street musicians are wise. Or interesting. Same with fire jugglers or anyone who may attend a festival. See: devised theatre.

4. Middle class boys wearing suits in underground car parks pointing guns, swearing and shouting into each other’s faces. Arguing over a suitcase full of something mysterious is equally dull.

Hey, no one's done this before!

5. Drugs. Films about drugs are as boring as the people who take them. It’s not about cool. It’s about interesting.

6. Raising your head and looking into a mirror to see how haunted you are. Not necessarily a film per se, but a cliché we never need to see again. See also any film where the protagonist sits on a beach looking at the waves. With an indie soundtrack.

Get a job

7. Films about young people. You may be a young person and think whatever you’re currently going through is important. It isn’t.

8. Love I.T.? Know how to do CG? Brilliant! Just don’t do an I Am Legend/Monsters knock-off about you alone in a deserted, abandoned city.

Hey, this already exists. So you don't need to do it less well!  

9. Work in an office? Don’t like it? Poor you. Funnily enough though – all bosses aren’t shits, and you’re actually a twat. Jobs are crap but ordinary people seem to manage them without casting themselves as Joseph K.

10. What is the nature of love? Are relationships possible in an existential universe? I don’t care and nor does anyone else. You don’t actually feel any more nor wound more deeply than anyone else. The difference is, they go and do dramatic and interesting things worth making films about.

You win. No one in the history of the world has ever understood suffering the way you understand suffering. At seventeen years old. I need to know about that via the medium of short film.

There you go. Totally unfair and biased. So what. I could have mentioned super heroes, martial arts and manga but I don't want to upset people.