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Short subject

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Short subjects might be in the form of travelogues, human interest films or concert films. The form was so popular that virtually all major film production companies had fully-staffed special units assigned to develop and produce them, and many companies, especially in the silent and very early sound era, produced short subjects exclusively (e.g. Keystone Studios, Atlas Educational Film Co., E. W. Hammons's Educational Pictures).

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[edit] Rise of the double feature

The death of the two-reel short as a commercially successful product for independent studios put producers such as Mack Sennett out of business. Hal Roach moved Laurel and Hardy full-time into feature films after 1935, and halved his popular Our Gang films to one reel at the request of distributor Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Roach, who could no longer afford to produce shorts after 1938, sold Our Gang to MGM at that time and exclusively produced features (and later, television shows) from then on.

After the 1930s, fewer shorts were made for theatrical release, most of which were one-reel long, like George O'Hanlon's Joe McDoakes shorts, and the animated shorts of studios like Leon Schlesinger Productions/Warner Bros. Cartoons, Walter Lantz and Fleischer/Famous Studios. These shorts and others were produced in-house by, or financed by, motion picture companies that either owned their own theater chains (for example, Loews Theatres) or forced theaters to take their shorts by selling them in the same unalterable package as their big-name features. This practice, called block booking, was declared illegal in 1948 by the US Supreme Court case United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., a case that also forced the theater chains to sell off their movie studios. By 1955, thanks to double features, the ban on block booking and the rise of television, the commercial live-action short was virtually dead, and the cartoon short was fading. Since the 1960s, short films have been largely reserved for independent filmmakers and special major-studio projects.

The Three Stooges shorts were the only major series of two-reelers to survive the double-feature system because they were issued by Columbia Pictures using block booking. They continued into the late-1950s, largely by reusing footage from previous series entries to reduce costs.

In the 1950s, television programming, including the telecasting of older short subjects, eclipsed the value of all but cartoons featuring well-loved characters. By the end of the 1960s, the cost of manufacturing outweighed the return, and short subjects effectively disappeared.

[edit] Short subjects in the modern era

Since the 1980s, the term "short subject" has come to be used interchangeably with "short film," an international, academic term used to mean a contemporary non-commercial motion picture that is substantially shorter than the average commercial feature film. There is no clear definition of the maximum length of a short film, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences classify it as 40 minutes, while the Internet Movie Database refer to any film lasting less than 45 minutes as a short subject. The short-film form is to the full-length film what the short story is to a full-fledged novel.

Short films often focus on difficult topics which longer, more commercial films usually avoid. Filmmakers benefit from larger freedoms and can take higher risks, but they must rely on festival and art house exhibition to achieve public display. Most short films are better known outside the United States than within, due to less rigidity of audience expectation as to program content, arrangement and length outside the U.S. However, film shorts are often a popular extra feature on a film's DVD. For instance, Pixar's DVD releases of its feature films typically includes not only a short that was distributed with the feature film in its initial theatrical release but also an original creation featuring the characters from the feature itself. Likewise, Warner Brothers often includes selected animated shorts from its considerable archives on DVD releases of its family-oriented films that have a thematic relationship.

Films such as S. Luciani's Dolls show how professional actors and crews still choose to create short films as alternative form of expression. Short films are often popular as first steps into the cinematic art among young filmmakers. They are cheaper and easier to make, usually don't take very long to produce, and their brevity makes shorts more likely to be watched by financial backers and others who want some demonstration of a filmmaker's ability (or, conversely, the format allows for more experimentation since most of them are unlikely to be seen by a wide audience).

Short filmmaking is also growing in popularity among amateurs and enthusiasts, who are taking advantage of affordable equipment. "Prosumer" or semi-professional cameras now cost under USD$3,000, and free or low-cost software is widely available that is capable of video editing, post-production work and DVD authoring.


[edit] Very short films

Very short films are sometimes considered as a category of their own. They are the film equivalent of microfiction, like the 60 Word Story. The International Festival of Very Shorts is a festival based in Paris which shows only films less than three minutes long.

[edit] Other media

[edit] Internet

Such films can also be easily distributed via the Internet; Across the Hall, for example, was solely distributed on the Internet. Certain websites which encourage the submission of user-created short films, such as YouTube, BritFilms and Newgrounds have attracted large communities of artists and viewers, whereas sites such as BBC Film Network focus on showcasing curated British shorts.

[edit] Television

Shorts are occasionally broadcast as filler when a scheduled film's length cannot be conventionally fit in the standard broadcast schedule and the short is intended to fill in the remaining time of the timeslot. By contast, Movieola is a Canadian cable channel devoted exclusively to shorts up to 40 minutes long. Another television station in Canada called Bite TV is trying to become the world's first user-generated television station, trying to get viewers to send in their videos.

[edit] Categories

The format has various sub-categories:

Short films can be classified based on storyline. There may be single, duo, triple or multi-version modes in picturizing a short film. Short films can be made to test new technologies and techniques.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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