Short films don't provide as many jobs

The argument

The argument evaluates films by what watching them supports rather than by what watching them is like. Its premise is that an audience's attention is not neutral: what people go to see determines what gets funded, and therefore how many people the industry is able to employ. On that measure the difference between the two formats is large. Short films require a smaller crew, and thus they provide fewer jobs to an already crazy and packed industry. Typically, short films operate on a skeleton crew which consists of anywhere from seven to fifteen crew members. Compare this to the average feature production size of a few thousand, and one can understand the significant difference in job opportunities. The gap is not marginal but a difference of orders of magnitude, so it could not be offset by short films simply being made more often or more cheaply. The word "skeleton" also indicates something about which jobs are missing. A crew of that size covers only the roles a production cannot proceed without, which means what a short film leaves out are the specialised and departmental positions — precisely the roles in which people build careers rather than take single engagements. From there the conclusion follows from the premise about where attention goes. Short films support fewer people, and thus are not necessarily worth watching. Feature films that provide careers for the maximum amount of people should be what audiences go to support. The claim is deliberately not that short films are poorly made, and it rests on no judgement of their quality at all. It is that an audience choosing what to watch is also choosing what to sustain, and by that criterion the format employing thousands has the stronger claim on a viewer than the one employing a dozen.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Short films provide gateways into jobs on larger film sets. Without short films, a lot of filmmakers would never get the chance to glimpse Hollywood. Short films deserve to be supported.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The criterion is indefensible as stated. It makes employment rather than anything about the film the reason to watch it, and would rank a bloated production above a better-made one. [Rejecting P2] The comparison is inflated. Feature crews run to dozens or low hundreds rather than thousands, and the meaningful figure would be jobs per pound spent or per hour of finished work — on which the gap narrows sharply. [Rejecting P3] The industry effect runs the other way as well. Short films are where directors, cinematographers and editors train and are hired from, so supporting them feeds the feature workforce the argument wants to protect.