ABSTRACT
Filmmakers all want their movies to be compelling. They want to engage audiences and make them want to keep watching. One of the enemies of good storytelling is boredom, and heaven forbid they should inflict that on their audiences. This chapter considers how filmmakers might be doing that in spite of themselves. If they are telling a story that requires a passage of time, they will need various locations to show that. Short films cannot have lots of characters. Often writers put in extra characters because they think a scene will be made "realistic" by including them. Establishing shots take up movie and shooting time and do not always add to the story. Lots of filmmakers get carried away with the groovyness of trick shots and the exotic and waste time and money getting them even though they do not add much to the story. Every scene and every bit of dialogue must serve that story in a short script.
