How many short films are made each year?

20 January '20 13 Comments on How many short films are made each year?

Short films are a medium close to my heart.

They provide emerging filmmakers with an opportunity to practice their craft, explore their ideas, meet peers and showcase their abilities to audiences and the industry.

There’s nothing quite like watching a festival programme of shorts and being transported to a different vision of reality every ten minutes or so.

But they are poorly tracked by researchers and industry watchers.  The nature of short films makes them hard to quantify and there is rarely a commercial drive to invest the time needed to dig deeper.

To go a small way to redress this oversight, I have sought to get a sense of the scale of short filmmaking.

How many short films are made each year?

This is a harder question to answer than it may first appear.  We have two challenges to overcome:

  1. What is a short film?
  2. How do we know if a short film has been made?

Taken literally, a short film is a film under a certain length.  I’ll address running time later in the article but length alone is not enough to paint a complete picture of what filmmakers mean when they refer to “short films”. Many film-based works are under ten minutes but wouldn’t be classified as “shorts”, such as music promos, video blogs, commercials and the videos of my niece’s school plays that my sister keeps sending me.

Therefore, for today’s research, I focused on short films that have played at a film festival.  This includes any and all festivals, not just the big, well-known ones.  This means we’re looking at a more consistent selection of films, rather than just “video content under [x] minutes long”.

It also has the added benefit of making it easier to tackle the second challenge, namely gathering data.  I relied on online sources, from movie listings sites to film festival catalogues. While I may have missed some smaller films, I’m confident I have tracked the vast majority of live-action short films which played at film festivals over the past nineteen years (2000 to 2018, inclusive).

This methodology reveals that since 2000, the number of festival short films has increased significantly.  In 2000 it was just over 1,000 whereas by 2015 it was almost 8,000 per year. This echos previous research I have conducted on short film festival submissions and feature-length movie production.

The chart below shows the number of new short films premiered each year, meaning that over this period just over 90,000 new live-action short films were made and screened at a festival.

This growth is likely due to a confluence of factors, including:

  • Cheaper filmmaking technology;
  • Increased information sharing online;
  • A greater number of film festivals.

Let’s now take a quick look at three other topics which the dataset reveals:

  • Runtime
  • Titles
  • Key creatives

How long is the average short film?

Historically, a short film was defined as being on just one or two 35mm film reels, i.e. 22 minutes long.  Today, airlines seem to define ‘short’ as under 60 minutes, the Oscars say under 40 minutes (although the average length of nominees is around 20 minutes) and at the Cannes Film Festival it’s just 15 minutes (although in typical Cannes style, some nominees are longer than this official limit).

Film festivals are perennially imploring filmmakers to reduce the length of their films, with most suggesting that ten minutes is already too long. Despite this, the average length of shorts in today’s study is 13 minutes and 31 seconds.

What is the most popular title among short films?

Rather pleasingly, the two most popular titles for short films are “Home” and “Alone”, followed by “The Interview”, “Broken” and “The Box”.

Directors, Producers and Writers of short films

Over 90% of short films only have one director.  This is similar to the situation found among feature films (more on that here) despite the fact that short films are not bound by the “only one director” rule which Hollywood movies have to abide by.  The rule comes from the Directors Guild of American (DGA) and is strictly enforced.

44% of short films have just one producer, 27% have two and the remaining 29% have three or more.  Almost three-quarters of shorts have just one writer and only 8% credit more than two writers.

Finally, I thought it would be interesting to see how often one person takes on both directing and producing a short film.   It turns out that just under half of short film directors also receive a producing credit.

Further reading

If you would like to read more about short films, you may enjoy these pieces:

Notes

This research is looking at live-action films, ie not animations or documentaries.

I added the festival criteria as, otherwise, I couldn’t be sure of a consistent and complete dataset.  In the process of conducting this research, I found details of almost half a million short films over the time studied (2000-18). About 10% were documentary short films and 5% were animated.  On closer inspection of my data, I discovered that rather than just capturing “short films” as I understood them to be, I had tracked many types of short-form content, such as TV mini-shows, online videos and music promos.  This wasn’t the intention, hence the festival screening rule.  Just to state the obvious, being screened at a film festival is not the only marker of success for a short film.  Shorts are made for a myriad of reasons and festival acceptance only speaks to some of them.

My use of online sources in English is likely to have created some kind of bias towards Western films.  I did what I could to spot-check this, such as ensuring that all films from major festivals are in my dataset and this didn’t seem to be a major issue.

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Comments

13 comments
  1. Hi Stephen,

    Thank you for this – I read it with great interest as my first short film has just started making the festival rounds (and is, incidentally, entirely average, as the run-time is 13:03 ;°)).

    There’s one category I would be interested in seeing added: that of writer-director or even (as in my own case) writer-producer-director. I say this not because I think *I* am worth mentioning but because I’d like to know how many other writers out there tried this tack.

    Thanks
    Vera

  2. I had exactly the same thought as Vera, about writer-producer-directors.

    The graph implies somewhere around 6,000 short films made in 2014. Your previous analysis of submissions to the Raindance Festival said c.4,000 narrative shorts were submitted to that one festival alone in 2015.

    Not all of those 2015 submissions were made in 2014, of course. All the same, I think your criteria dramatically underestimates the number of films actually made. I doubt that even Eliot would claim that two thirds of all short film producers submit to that great festival.

    Looking at it another way, all festivals reject some submissions. Small festivals may reject 50%. For prestige festivals it may be over 90%. As both a filmmaker and a festival runner (“Short film Reviews”), I’d hazard a guess that up to 50% of films fail to get selected to ANY festival at all, live or online.

    I wonder if Film Freeway has aggregated data on all films posted there, accepted or rejected?

    Keep up the good work!

    Glyn

    1. Hi Glyn

      I agree that the number of films which played at festivals is much lower than the total made. In the final section of the piece I mentioned that my ‘full’ list was over five times larger than the refined “festival accepted” list. The tricky thing is that when we go out that wide we pick up many productions that stretch the definition of “short film”. I thought it was better to be specific and accurate that broad and risk being inaccurate.

      From the data I have, and by making a highly subjective guess at what most people think of as a “short film”, I’d say that about one in four short films made it into at least one festival.

      S

  3. Thank you for these reports; they are most informative.

    I echo the previous comments about knowing the writer-director and/or writer-producer percentages.

    My question: do the numbers reference total films submitted, or unique films (whereby each film was counted only once, rather than for every appearance at a film fest)?

  4. Hi Stephen,

    I am interested on what methodologies did you use to 1) limit to x number of festivals/how did you decide which to include? in my city alone i can count 4 big festival or over 100 small ones.
    2) which tools did you use to gather their archived listings? I worked for a few festival for year and them themselves have no idea how many shorts they screened!

    We are looking at helpful analytical tools for reporting at my organisation, and this would be most helpful!

    Thank you

    1. Hi Annie

      Great questions. I accepted anything kind of festival which sets it’s self up as a film festival, no matter the size. The aim was not to provide a measure of quality but rather look for at least one self-reported screening date. The primary method is film listings sites, with data form the festivals being useful to verify the strength of the dataset. You’re right that if I’d worked the other way back (i.e. festival sites then verify with listings) then I would have struggled due to the poor record of submissions available online.

      S

  5. Hi Stephen,
    Thanks for the great research that you do. You didn’t mention anything about the geographical locations of the festivals or the films tracked. Are the numbers based on the UK or worldwide or..?

  6. hello! very interesting data ! is this for all around the world (europe , usa , asia , africa etc ? ). It seems very few at first glance. I am writing an assay for my university on the production of short films in europe and i would be really gratefull if i could have some more input on sources etc…

  7. HI Stephen,

    Thanks for sharing these details. It is atleast some sort of data on short films. I have been searching for some reliable data on the short film industry but it is woefully missing.

    That said, I strongly feel that you have underestimated the number of short films produced annually by a large factor. We, Pocket Films (www.pocketfilms.in) are India’s largest distributor of short films and the no. 1 partner for YouTube in India for such content.

    We release around 300 films every year and this is after rejecting 4 times as many for one or another reason. For eg. between September 2020 to August 2021, we received more than 1,200 submissions for distribution and we selected ~300 for release.

    This is just us and this is primarily content created only in India. I would think that India alone produces more than 10,000 to 15,000 short films every year. I am not suggesting that all these films are great content but still they make up the industry.

    To clarify, when we refer to these numbers, we are referring to short films or as we call it ‘filmed entertainment’. These do not include skits, music videos, tik tok kind of videos, etc.

    That said, I would really appreciate if you can include me in your email database and share updates / statistics on the industry.

  8. Thanks for the information on short films. Good article. Nice analysis. We (http://samskritabharatiusa.org) promote the ancient language of Samskritam. We have conduct Samskrit Short Film competitions. We will be premiering top listed short films from the 3rd Annual Samskrit Film Festival (organized in collaboration with Samskrita Bharati in India) during the weekend of April 9-10, 2022 on our YouTube Channel (http://youtube.com/samskritabharatiusa).
    Thanks again for publishing well-researched, useful information on short films.

  9. Hi Stephen,

    I was wondering if you have updated your analysis for 2021 and 2022. Have yo also published the list of all the film festivals that you gathered your data from?

    Thanks Gary

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