Feature films and Short films

 

 Differences between Feature films and Short films

The biggest and most obvious difference between short films and feature films is of course, the length. For a short film must be less than 40 minutes in duration.

Another point we need to consider is budget, a successful feature film will have a considerably larger budget than an short film. This is due to the need to pay the cast and crew, rent or purchase of equipment and props, land rent, studio rent, marketing and so much more.

Feature films are shown in cinemas to generate revenue whereas Short films are intended for dvd/Tv because they are made to convey a message, not make money usually. 

Also Short films usually have a lesser known cast and crew, the reason is there are more purposes, all of which can be seen in the purposes section.

Finally, when seeing a feature film people will expect to see an ending but in case of short film there is no need of ending if there was not enough time to tie up every loose end.

Documentary Films

Documentary Films strictly speaking, are non-fictional, "slice of life" factual works of art - and sometimes known as cinema verite. 

Documentary films have comprised a very broad and diverse category of films. Examples of documentary forms include the following:

• 'biographical' films about a living or dead person (Madonna, John Lennon, Muhammad Ali - , Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time (1992), or Glenn Gould)
• a well-known event the Holocaust, 
• a sociological or ethnographic examination following the lives of individuals over a period of time ( Steve James' Hoop Dreams (1994))
• a sports documentary such as Extreme (1999) such as in The Endless Summer (1966))

The Earliest Documentaries:

Originally, the earliest documentaries in the US and France were either short newsreels, instructional pictures, records of current events, or travelogues without any creative story-telling, narrative, or staging. 

The first attempts at film-making, by the Lumiere Brothers and others, were literal documentaries, e.g., a train entering a station, factory workers leaving a plant, etc.

The first official documentary or non-fiction narrative film was Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922), an ethnographic look at the harsh life of Canadian Inuit Eskimos living in the Arctic, Flaherty, often regarded as the "Father of the Documentary Film," also made the film Moana in1926.

Rock Concert/Music-Related Documentaries:

Michael Wadleigh's Woodstock - 3 Days of Peace & Music (1970) provided a definitive look at the three-day counter-cultural rock concert held in upper-state NY in 1969 - it was the Academy Award winning documentary film of its year

Biographical Documentary Films:

        The Oscar-winning documentary by Richard Kaplan, The Eleanor Roosevelt Story (1965), was a tribute to one of the most influential First Ladies in US history.  Bruce Weber's Let's Get Lost (1988) was a biographical account of the life of jazz trumpeter 

   

  Documentaries of The War Years:
Documentaries during the Great War were often propagandistic. Innovative German film-maker Leni Riefenstahl's pioneering masterwork epic Triumph of the Will in 1935, Germany. was explicitly propagandistic yet historical horrifying documentation of the Nazi Party Congress rally in Nuremberg in 1934. It was a revolutionary film combining superb cinematography and editing of Third Reich propaganda. She also documented the 1936 Berlin Olympics in the stunning film Olympia (1938, Germ.) - with graceful and beautiful images of 'Aryan' athletes in competition.

 To respond to the Nazi propaganda, Frank Capra was commissioned by the US War Department to direct seven films in a Why We Fight (1943) series of narrated WWII newsreel-style films.