Short Movie Themes and Tips

Here we are, new year just started, we are ready for new challenges. Is making a short movie one of them?

Let’s face it, while creating a science project can be exhausting and you sometimes don’t even know where to start with research, short movies seem like a way to go, an easy approach to BOSEPO. You my friend are not completely wrong, considering that nowadays almost everyone has a mobile phone that can record amazing videos, one could just start the camera rolling and record that short movie. But, the reality is this: the moment you hit that record button, things do not seem to be the same anymore. You think what to say, how to convey your message. You record one, record twice, it didn’t turn out as you wanted it. You may need a plot, a script, a plan what to say and how to show it visually on the screen. After many trials and errors you finally made it, but did it convey the message it should?

All these questions start to rumble down the path of you recording your short movie. Everyone wants that “Academy award” quality movie, but there is a certain amount of skill needed to have a proper approach to a high quality short movie. Don’t worry, we are here to help. While we can’t promise to teach you how to make a million dollar movie, we can give you some tips to get you started.

Let’s start with the rules. Before we do anything else, we need to look into technical details, we don’t want to make a short movie just to be disqualified before we even get to the competition.

The Rules

Create short movie in which you will convey the message (short movie themes in the next paragraph) in a story enhanced with visual and audio effects by using popular video editing tools like After Effects, Sony Vegas, Movie Maker, Adobe Premiere, Final Cut, iMovie etc.

• The duration of the film must be between 3 and 5 minutes.
• English subtitles are required for submissions with language/s other than English.
• Films should be uploaded to any Google Drive account and shared with [email protected] e-mail address including a note with the movie title, sub category and mentor name before the deadline (07.02.2020.). You should also add a description / synopsis and upload the script / scenario to apply.bosepo.ba website until then. Projects without the video or description / synopsis or script / scenario will be disqualified. Contact your mentor for support regarding applications. We also encourage you to upload your short movie to YouTube and share it with your friends to get the hype going.
• All genres are accepted with the exception of music videos and animations.
• Stock footage can be used in some part of the movie if not fully allowed.
• Slideshows are not accepted.

The Themes

Since we are partnered with various international project olympiads that include short movie categories, to give you a better overall experience and increase your chances to participate in those competitions with the same short movie, we have a practice to include all of those themes.

Infomatrix 2020 (Romania) – Immigration

The Intellectuals’ Challenge 2020 (United Kingdom, Cambridge) – Leadership: inspire Change

Genius Olympiad (New York, USA) – Any global or local environmental issue

There are other competitions that have valuable short movie categories such as our Sarajevo Film Festival with their Teen Arena program, but they don’t have a specific theme, they look for overall approach as a movie, which makes you eligible to apply with any of the above themes. Here is the link for SFF short movie rules: Teen Action Shorts

The Tips

Here are some videos that can help you prepare your short movie better:

• Who does what on a film?
• Learn the art of pre-production (and why it matters)
• Storyboarding
• Navigate the hows and whys and Whats?!? of closed captioning

Also we advise you to search for former videos that others made to see their approach and get some inspirational ideas or tips by watching those:

BOSEPO short movies on YouTube

INFOMATRIX short movies on YouTube

GENIUS OLYMPIAD short movies on YouTube

Sarajevo Film Festival short movies on YouTube

(For SFF, we participated once with our winning BOSEPO short movie “The Brainwashed” and won an honorable mention award among 50+ submitted movies that year. You can watch the winning SFF short movie “Logs” in that playlist as well to get a scope of what quality and story it conveys.)

We hope that this article was helpful to you and that it will get you started with film making. All you need now is to start the camera and tell your awesome story. Let’s see some short movie folks!