Short films don't allow for character development

The argument

The objection to short films is about what the form can accommodate rather than about the talent of the people working in it. In the short span of time a short film allows, there is not nearly enough room to fully develop the main characters, because development is not a single revelation but an accumulation: a character becomes known through repeated situations that test them differently, and repetition takes screen time that the format does not have. The comparison proponents offer is arithmetical. Short films run on average at around fifty minutes or less, while a feature runs for roughly ninety to a hundred. That is twice the amount of time in which to understand and fully develop a protagonist, and the extra time is not simply more of the same. It is what allows a film to establish a character, place them under pressure, and then show the consequence, rather than presenting one situation and ending. What this costs, on the argument's account, is the attachment that makes watching worthwhile. Audiences want characters they can feel attached to and connected with, and attachment is a product of time spent in someone's company. It is incredibly difficult to produce that response within a short film, and a film that fails to produce it leaves the viewer having observed a situation rather than having cared about anyone in it. Proponents concede that some short films succeed at this. The concession is what sets up the final claim, which concerns the odds rather than the ceiling: although some succeed, a lot will not, and a viewer has no reliable way of identifying which is which before watching. Scanning through a great many short films in order to find the occasional one that manages genuine character work is not, on this view, worth the time it takes, particularly when the same hours spent on features would deliver it far more consistently.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Often times, we get to understand and know characters even better than we would in a feature. We get a specific snippet of life versus a general oversweep.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The definition is wrong and the inference does not hold. Under the usual industry definitions a short film runs to about 40 minutes at most and is commonly under 20 — but length is not the point, since it sets how much can be shown rather than whether a character can be understood. Novels and short stories differ in the same way without the shorter form failing to produce characters. [Rejecting P2] "Attachment" is treated as something that accumulates with screen time, when it is more often produced by a decisive moment — which is what the shorter form is built around, as the counter observes. The second half of the premise then changes the argument entirely: "most won't succeed, so it isn't worth searching" is a claim about hit rates, and by that standard most features would fail too. [Rejecting C] The conclusion generalises from a constraint of the form to a verdict on all of it. At most the premises support the claim that short films are less likely to develop characters at length, which describes a different kind of work rather than giving a reason not to watch it.