Short Films?

They Just Don't Talk To One Another

One of the many issues raised with the new Screen Australia organisation is the cutting of the Short Film fund. The argument is that the short films are necessary to nurture future film makers. The problem with short films however is that they NEVER make their money back. There just isn't a large enough market on the planet.

The one reason you would make a short film is to at least have a dry-run to experience what it is to make a film. Better that a director has experienced the rigors and problems in a shorter format with less risk than to go into a feature film completely cold.It's a worthwhile investment.You'd think the Federal Government would be interested in making such investments if it's going to hand over 103million dollars a year to Screen Australia to make Australian films with Australian talent.

The funny thing is that Federal government already hands out money for such a purpose, and it's called AFTRS. That's right, the Australian Film and Television School - alma mater to Peter Weir, Gillian Armstrong, Jane Campion and PJ Hogan. That place. Yes, my alma mater too. It's the one place where the budding film maker can chance his talent and work his skill on short films; and it's all Federally funded.

The even funnier thing is that in my day, when one came out of this school. one then went to the various funding bodies to find that one *didn't* have enough experience to be considered for funding. This has bothered me for a long time because the ramifications ae that the time I spent at AFTRS learning and honing  my craft was and is to all intents and purposes, irrelevant to other Federal and State Film agencies. It just doesn't make sense.

Yet, there it was. You had to have a feature film credit to be able to apply for some of these grants. Now, back at Film School, but film school bureaucracy thwarted and resisted any and every attempt by the students to combine their budgets to make one big feature film.

This was because part of the guidelines of AFTRS was that it should not compete with the main industry. This was because if AFTRS chose to compete with the main industry, it had enough infrastructure to eclipse whole portions of the industry. In other words, it was a pretty competitive piece of the industry, just by its existence.

Yet, in a clearly uncompetitive move, AFTRS removed itself from the feature film market by becoming a sort of short-film studio. Having gone down that way, it is well qualified to continue producing short films for budding film-makers. It is what it is ideally placed to do.

What Screen Australia ought to do is farm out the short film programme to AFTRS and in exchange, they should preferentially draft the talent coming out of AFTRS in a low budget feature film programme. If they don't, then you have to ask why they should even continue to have the AFTRS any more.

You know it makes sense. FFC and AFTRS should have done it years ago, but they didn't. They just don't talk to each other, do they now?