Dirty money : a video dissertation based on an original screenplay

Abstract

The short film is a medium ideally suited to the non-professional film-maker in which he can articulate his ideas or feelings via three elements of film. When the medium becomes a combination of the literary, the musical, and the visual, the short student-film can, and must be, personal. Only with this insistence on coherent authorship will it be authentic, demanding that the film-maker test every gesture and line-reading against personal experiences and emotion. Its techniques must be, above all, expressive, bending the spectator's eye and emotion to the film-maker's vision, however bizarre or removed from normal experience. Because of its short duration, a fifteen minute fiction film requires an exceptionally tight screenplay designed to expose plot, characters, mood and setting with economy and logic. When the writing is complimented with the other equally important area of fil-making, aesthetics, the short film can add to its merit and repeat value.