what makes a good short film

Today in media we looked at short films, some which were successful they went on to gain a few awards.
These films; similar to our future ones were very short but portrayed good stories, and kind of in depth, in a short amount of time and this done very effectively.

Our teacher taught us that this was due to a few elements, which we should take in considerations ourselves when cleaning up our short stories and our treatments Firstly:

SIMPLE IDEA’S- we need to remember that we are not exactly making feature length films, so our ideas should be kept simple, but we should execute them properly. An example of this was a short film we watched called, ‘The first time it hits’ was simply about a young skater boy who fancies a girl, and tries to do a skate trick to try and impress her, however it doesn’t go to plan. This simple story idea, showed through but visually the film looked good and it was good, and easy to understand.

This is a tool which I thought we could apply to my first treatment film
‘WATCH’ as the story is very heavy, far from light hearted and the time limit may make things a little hard, as we may not have enough time to show everything that needs to be shown or, a lot of things may eventually have to be taken away from the concept rather than built upon, due to how heavy and complex it was.
Secondly:

MOTIVATED CHARACTERS- Characters, every single good character, has to be motivated. There must be a trigger, reason for their actions, so that what ever they do is backed up and doesn’t just seem too random, like in ‘The first time it hit’ the skater boy’s motivation for the trick, was to impress this girl, he wanted to impress her BECAUSE, he liked her.
So this taught me that our chracters in our film must be, motivated for the film to make sense. Chracters must also be round/believable, or else there is no point in the story, even if our film was to be fiction, us as an audience should still be able to believe what is going on and the characters in the film, for example in ‘ice cream dreams’ the story of a young girl who lives with her mum and dad, who own an ice cream van trying to make ends meat. Her dad wants her to make friends but, the girls fear (represented as a mean version of herself) tells her that the kids in the area will not want to play with her.
The imaginary girl persuading her to remain alone is believable, although we know she does not really exits.

This is something I would use to evaluate our ‘woman’ character in our treatment for ‘RED’. Her character in the film is stringing a few men along, however the reasons WHY, she is doing this and I guess that that will need to be decided, and looked over.
Thirdly:

PLOT POINTS- plot points need to be very clear, have a clear beginning middle and end, the need to be simple, without too much going on kind of like the story idea points above. This tool can be used to look over the ‘WATCH’ treatment as the story does have quiet a lot going on, from the mentally disturbed woman, and the child, and the court problems, these are good ideas, however they are not really accessible.
And lastly:

DIALOGUE- our teacher told us that most successful short films have pithy dialogue, meaning the dialogue is only present when significant and important for something, rather than having endless useless dialogue which drags the film on. In my opinion one of the best ones we watched was ‘the first time it hit’ and this is a good example of all points as it didn’t have any dialogue, everything was shown through music imagery and mis en scene and body language.
We intend to make a silent movie anyways, or a film with less dialogue as possible, so this will help me to make my own future silent film better.