All you need to make a feature film these days is a digital camera. So why do so many young film-makers aim to make mini-masterpieces, just minutes long, instead, asks Patrick Butler.
If Brendan Muldowney gets a bit drunk and manages to schmooze the right people at Cork Film Festival this week he will be a happy man. Although his seventh short film, Beauty Queen, is being screened with another of his shorts, The Honourable Scaffolder, the 34-year-old-director is not expecting to come away with a contract to make a Hollywood blockbuster. "The best thing is that I could make a few contacts, make more people aware of me," says Muldowney, who has been making shorts since 1994.
Cork Film Festival has an international reputation as a showcase for short films. Last year it received 1,100 entries from around the world. This year, it will screen 116 shorts chosen from 1,500 entries from around the world, with many submissions coming from Ireland.But in this age of cheap digital video, where minimal budgets can create feature-length productions - a fact recognised by the Irish Film Board, which now offers up to €100,000 for "micro-budget" feature-length films - why are so many directors still opting to make shorts?
The evidence suggests most would prefer to make longer films. "The majority of shorts are like mini-features," says Mick Hannigan, the festival's director. "You can see that the film-maker would much rather be making a feature." Many would undoubtedly like to emulate the international commercial and critical success of Ireland's best-known film directors, Neil Jordan and Jim Sheridan. The irony is that you won't find any shorts in their back catalogues. Both made their film-directing debuts with full-length features, Jordan with Angel and Sheridan with the Oscar-winning My Left Foot.
One of the reasons Brendan Muldowney has continued to make shorts is simply that he has not yet written a feature-length script for a digital film, nor has he found a script by someone else that he feels could be used to satisfactorily exploit the new technology. "The only reason I would do a digital feature is if the script suited it," he says. "I don't see the point of going out and making a film just because you can."
Yet some Irish film-makers have gone out and made no-budget or low-budget feature films on video just because they could. In 1996 November Afternoon, made by John Carney and Tom Hall mostly on domestic Hi8 video, won over audiences in Cork and beyond. For Ireland this was a unique approach to feature-length drama, and it inspired a number of film-makers to skip the long, arduous and usually unpaid short-film route and go straight to shot-on-video features. None matched the impact of Carney and Hall's film, however. With Kieran Carney, the pair are now best known for creating Bachelors Walk (before which John Carney had directed a Hollywood-funded feature, On The Edge).
Graham Cantwell, whose short A Dublin Story was also selected for Cork, where it is being shown tonight, has gone down both feature and short-film routes in an effort to establish himself as a director. Still in his 20s, he has already made nine shorts and attempted a low-budget digital feature, L'Etranger. But he admits that the projected 90-minute drama, which was shot in the digital Mini DV format two years ago and has already eaten up €10,000, is far from finished. "Basically what I've got is a digital storyboard," says Cantwell.
Although L'Etranger remains unfinished, the director was able to edit it into an impressive enough trailer to convince an established company to produce his latest short. Cantwell believes producers are more impressed by people who have made features than by people who have made shorts - although an award-winning short can have as much impact, he says. "The fact that you made a digital feature is more impressive than the film itself," he says.
Seamus Duggan of Film Base, which funded Cantwell's short, believes there is some economic sense in making a low-budget film, be it a short or a feature, in a video format. It allows funds to be spent on what is put in front of the camera rather than the film stock that has to go inside it. "There are few occasions that the use of film is completely justified," says Duggan. Yet would-be film-makers continue to queue up to realise their dreams on celluloid. Film Base alone received 250 scripts for its last short-film awards.
Duggan believes well-made short films can be calling cards for film-makers, helping to convince people that their directors are capable of bigger and better things. They also allow novices to experiment and make mistakes. "You can push the limits of film-making in a way that you cannot do if 10 investors are looking over your shoulder," says Duggan.
Damien O'Donnell - the patron saint, were there such a thing, of Irish short-film-makers - agrees with this and accepts that shorts can be fantastic training, but they are much more than that. "Short films are an art form in their own right."
O'Donnell's 1995 short film, 35 Aside, won dozens of awards around the world. He then went on to feature film success when he directed the hit, East is East. He is now about to start shooting his third feature, Inside I'm Dancing.
He is still a huge fan of the short format, however. "I would rather have 10 minutes of an entertaining short than 10 minutes of entertainment in a 100-minute feature."
O'Donnell is perhaps unique in that his first short film directly led to his first feature-directing job. When the girlfriend of the writer of East Is East saw 35 Aside on television she was so impressed she convinced her partner to consider O'Donnell for the role of director.
Mick Hannigan of Cork Film Festival concedes that few if any shorts-makers will attain anything like O'Donnell's success. Many whose pieces are screened at the festival may continue to work in the industry but might never direct a film again, short or long. "The statistics would bear out that there is a poor transition to features," he admits.
Some shorts-makers may become disillusioned because there are so few outlets for their work: the public is rarely exposed to what can be mini-masterpieces. The situation is improving, however. The film distributor Buena Vista has already attached Short Shorts - three-minute films funded by the Irish Film Board - to some of the year's hits. David Gleeson's Hunted, for example, was shown before Veronica Guerin, and Tom Collins's The Phantom Cnut was screened before Intermission, exposing tens of thousands of film-goers to shorts they might otherwise have overlooked.
And in the new year RTÉ will increase the number of short films it screens. Its short-film slot - formerly called Debut, now known as Shortscreen - will run every week in 2004.
The Irish Film Board will continue to fund short films through a range of awards, including the sought-after Shorts Cuts scheme, co-funded by RTÉ, which provides up to €80,000 for films such as Muldowney's Beauty Queen.
That said, its micro-budget scheme, which offers film-makers the chance to produce full-length digital features on minuscule financing of up to €100,000, opens the door for those eager to leap into features. The film board acknowledges that, despite their low budgets, such projects are high risk, as they could end up unreleased or even unfinished. "It's not a shorts-or-features situation. It's a different type of film-making," says Moira Horgan, IFB's head of marketing.
Perhaps the trick to using new technology is to start early. Conor McMahon did - at 14, using a video camera. He subsequently made more than 50 shorts and, at the age of 24, is finishing his first feature, a zombie horror called Dead Meat, one of the two digital features funded through the film board's micro-budget scheme.
It is McMahon's first film since graduating from film school, and although he doesn't rule out making shorts again he would rather make a feature were he given the choice."At the end of the day that is the business," he says.
Cork Film Festival runs until Sunday, when it will present its shorts awards. The Honourable Scaffolder is being screened tonight, Beauty Queen tomorrow. For full details visit www.corkfilmfest.org
